Puzzle
NASA
In a first, NASA's Hubble Telescope directly measures mass of a lone white dwarf
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has added one more first in its list. Astronomers using the Hubble Telescope have for the first time directly measured the mass of a single, isolated white dwarf – the surviving core of a burned-out, Sun-like star. Researchers found that the white dwarf is 56 percent the mass of the Sun. This agrees with earlier theoretical predictions of the white dwarf's mass and corroborates current theories of how white dwarfs evolve as the end product of a typical star's evolution. The unique observation yields insights into theories of the structure and composition of white dwarfs, NASA said in a report.