Astronomers have found the first ever green star, in a study that shows white dwarves can actually come in a wide array of different colours.
According to The Independent, the colour of most stars is decided by their colour: when they are cooler, they are orange, whereas our own warmer Sun is white, and the very hottest are a pale blue.
Previously, researchers had thought that white dwarves – the remains that are left behind after stars like our Sun die, would work in the same way.
But new research suggests that, despite their name, white dwarves can actually come in a wide array of colours.
If we were able to get up close with them, they would come in pink, cyan, yellow, purple – and even green, according to the authors of the study, who found the first such example ever seen.
“Most stars, including most white dwarfs, behave like ‘perfect radiators,’ so their colour is set almost entirely by temperature. But nobody had really looked into what else might be possible for white dwarfs,” said Mark Hollands, from the University of Warwick, who led the work.
“It turns out these incredibly dense stars can produce colours nobody expected, and some of them genuinely surprised me," he added.
White dwarves are unusual because they are so dense, the researchers say: they are millions of times denser than the outer shell of the Sun, roughly the same as water. That density means that any elements that might be around are able to interact with the plasma in the white dwarf, absorbing light across many more colours.
