White Dwarfs. The Future of the Universe

Science has a lot to thank the great German-born British astronomer William Herschel for the discovery of the first white dwarf as well as Uranus. It occurred on 31 January 1783. By the end of the third decade of the last century, only three white dwarfs were known, and then their number began to grow rapidly.

- White dwarfs were historically the first cosmic objects whose nature could only be explained on the basis of quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity.

- According to stellar statistics, more than 90% of all burning stars have already become white dwarfs or will become in millions or billions of years.

- The Sun will become a regular white dwarf in about seven and a half billion years. In doing so, it will retain only slightly more than half its current mass.

 

It is the first book in Russian, almost entirely devoted to the cooling remnants of stars known as white dwarfs. Turning into the outer space remains awaits almost all stars except the high-mass ones. The history of the discovery of white dwarfs and their study goes back decades, and the author not only describes in detail their physical nature and paradoxical properties, but also talks about the scientists who have devoted their lives to studying these objects of deep space. In addition to information about supernovae and cosmological problems associated with white dwarfs, the reader is introduced to the history of radio astronomy, learning about the discovery of pulsars and quasars, the first detection, the origin and properties of microwave relic radiation and its role in exploring the Universe.