Why White Dwarf Stars Unexpectedly Stop Cooling Down 

You are the best questioner. You get such fascinating answers, politely pressing until you get there. White dwarfs turning into solid plasmas is amazing.

I loved the topic, thank you. This is in the category: "didn't realise I always wanted to know more about this". Awesome! You can definitely tell how full of enthusiasm Simon is with how he's looking for the right answer and filtering tangents. Great video as always

Now t h a t was a great interview. I learned more from him than any I can remember. Dead star forensics, dead planet forensics, nova alchemy, ...

Une chance que j'ai jamais rencontré ce gars là dans un bar on serait encore en train de jaser de solid plasma.

Shine on, you crazy diamond!

What an excellent interview! I felt the excitement that a young astronomer feels when they find something that no one else knows.

Hi @frasercain - so this seems to me like the energy of the crystallization is being used to maintain a constant temperature - much like the freezing of eutectic crystals used to maintain a constant temperature in some passively cooled / heated houses. And this remains the case until the liquid phase is all turned to crystal. But in this case, the convection of the crystals keeps this process efficient for a very long time due to the efficient mixing. Am I on the right track in my understanding? It was a fascinating interview - keep going with the deep dives of the interviews. They are great.

Totally fascinating upload Mr Cain. Thanks a bunch.

This channel is great. I've always been a fan, you write good articles. I hope you keep this channel going, I'll be here to like your videos. Great guest!

Spectroscopy seems to be the lifeblood of astronomy. Could you interview someone that knows history, current techniques and future tech in the field?

08:48 If a "Black Dwarf" was detected, the most _logical_ conclusion would NOT be that "the universe is way older", but rather: a) "Tunnels" connecting to other (older) universes existed at some point (at least the "exit" points going into our universe), big enough for a star to go through it without suffering "spaguetification". b) Time-Travel is possible (this Black Dwarf was "sent" from the future), meaning it likely contains a lot of DATA inside. c) There is a "process" that can extract (almost) all the energy of a star. This is just a "cold campfire" left behind by an "errant" entity from a Kardashev III+ Civilization.

Very Awesome conversation!!! Thank you both!

This is so fascinating. Great interview as always!

Fascinating!!! Always learn something new every time i watch this channel. Keep up the good work.

This was really interesting

«I want to push back on that diamond thing.» Wut a surprise !!!

This was such an interesting interview. Thanks.

Very good explanation.

Awesome topic

love these deep dives

I had to laugh out loud when I heard Fraser's first question. This guy knows exactly how to ask a scientist

8:05 wait.....you can have solid plasma? My mind was just blown

By his definition of plasma, amorphous metals (metallic glass) are also plasma. I was always told that plasma is a an ionized gas. Have I been lied to?

Technical answers in a second language are difficult, but he was trying!

Fascinating! Thinking about aliquid and solid or even crystalline plasma just makes me want to ask more questions. Vey cool! Thank you

If the temperature of Neon-rich white dwarfs remains relatively constant for billions of years, could newly formed planets (post red giant) potentially evolve into habitable worlds orbiting the white dwarf?

I take a huge interest in blue objects of the universe, primarily blue stars like the Orion Belt stars, but also blue galaxies like M101 and blue planets like HD 189733b. Naturally I also take an interest in white dwarfs, because they are often quite bluish. I am of course aware that white dwarfs cool over time and become less blue and more yellow and red. But I had never before heard that most white dwarfs have cooled so much that they are cooler than the Sun, and I'm not sure I believe in it. I googled the typical surface temperature of white dwarfs, and I was told that their typical temperature is 10,000 K. That is the same temperature as Vega. Of course, at 10,000 K the white dwarf has already cooled down mightily, because they will have started out at a 100,000 K or hotter (perhaps even 1,000,000 K or more). Still, at 10,000 K Vega looks decidedly blue-white when observed through a telescope, and it certainly doesn't look yellowish. So a white dwarf of 10,000 K would look blue-white too, and it would be 4,000 K hotter than the Sun. I also googled "white dwarfs in globular clusters", and I found a Hubble image of white dwarfs in globular cluster M4. In the Hubble image, the white dwarfs all look bluish. So please explain how most white dwarfs in the universe can be cooler and more yellow than the Sun, because this is the first time I have ever heard that claim!

My brain might go supernova trying to think about solid plasma 🤯

I would have thought that just the crystallisation process would be enough to stop the cooling (like when water freezes, it says at 0° until all water is solid). What's the proportion of energy output just from crystallisation versus enrgy output from gravitational potential? I would think that there would be several stops in the cooling process. For example, cooling would resume once neon concentration reaches a certain point, then stops when it starts crystalizing again and when another element starts concentrating in the bottom of the gravitational well. Etc.

Crystalline plasma, interesting indeed

This is good news for our descendants living at the END OF TIME® This "insulation" keeps some of the thermal energy White Dwarfs trapped for much longer times (allowing for a more efficient collection overtime), specially considering that the longer they get to retain it, the cooler the cosmic background radiation becomes & that tiny difference means quadrillions of years of computation.

Be me, an alien civilization, cooling white dwarves to scare other aliens into thinking the universe is older.

Interesting topic, I do wonder if there is more than one process going on - nature seems to hate a vacuum, or a single pathway to a solution, so I would hazard that there may be several pathways that allow the WD to stay "hot" for longer than we originally thought. Another good interview @frasercain, very informative.

What if planet is formed after star converts into the white dwarf? And it will be in habitable zone. Would life be possible there?

I get the feeling he wasn't crazy about the 1a supernova discussion. Too mainstream. He's definitely a White Dwarf Hipster. lol. Very cool.

So I decide to return to my studies on white dwarves and suddenly, they are all over the internet. Until this week, I had no idea that there's no simple way to estimate the WD brightness and you have to do full simulation with a bunch of assumptions. That's quite interesting...

Wow this man is well informed and clearly very knowledgeable… No I wasn’t thinking of you Fraser.. y

"White dwarfs...are way too hot to be at such cool temperatures." (this was said somewhere between the 8 and 9 minute mark) - I just would not know what to say in reply to that statement.

The planet wreckage reminds me a field of archeology, when more destructive scenario leads to better understanding of the culture/planet that was destroyed 🤣 Anyway thanks for another interesting interview

The explanation starts at 13:37, an interesting idea.

Fission based heating seemed to be more likely.

Neon? I thought it is produced by carbon/oxygen fusion at about 600M K in stars 8 to 10 times more massive than our Sun. So the neon must have been one of the metals in the nebula in which our Sun formed.

Fraser Cain. I have a question unrelated to this post. I have an an explanation for the galaxy rotation curves that doesn't require dark matter. Imagine yourself as a person standing on Earth and feeling a normal amount of gravitational pull. Then imagine that you could fall through the planet without any friction or resistance to your fall. You would fall toward the center until you passed the center and then you would slow down as you came up to the surface on the other side. What if you were able to orbit the center of Earth with an orbital radius of say a kilometer? The gravitational attraction would be very small, as if you were orbiting an asteroid with a kilometer radius, and you would have to orbit quite slowly to not fly away. I think the same goes with a galaxy. Instead of normal planetary gravitational interactions between a star and it's planets where the inner planets orbit much faster than the outer ones because all the attraction is toward the star, in a galaxy the mass is distributed more throughout. Instead of it all being in the center, it's more like a spinning cloud of mass consisting of the whole thing where mass isn't concentrated at the center, like being inside the Earth as said before. Wouldn't this understanding result in the relatively similar orbital speeds of the outer and inner stars that we assumed we needed some kind of dark matter to explain? I didn't mention the SMBH's because from what I understand, their mass is very small compared to that of the rest of the galaxy and wouldn't affect rotation curves a great amount.

So planets that survive the formation of the white dwarf could potentially last for tens or hundreds of billions of years? And where is the habitable zone around a white dwarf?

Great video! At about the 8 min mark, he says a plasma can be both a plasma and a solid... I thought a "plasma" was a 4th state of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma)... So is a 'solid plasma' a 5th state of matter? And are there liquid plasmas and gaseous plasmas?...He also says a "plasma" is just where the electrons are removed from the atoms... So doesn't that mean we could consider any electrically conductive metal a plasma? (as the electrons flow free of or removed from their atoms?).

As well as the "not cooling" mechanism mentioned here, wouldn't crystallisation itself release heat, so slowing the cooling even more?

I wonder if neon gas is concentrated in a trap between other gasses to make a thermal infinity lamp??? And will plateau to cooling process for a good while? If there are molecules still dancing in the trap then the neon stays lit? Or a model like this happening using other forces at play?

Can we make a space interferometer with an array of telescopes to use the Sun as a gravitational lens? In my head you could adjust the distance between the telescopes to focus and avoid having to go out to the ludicrous distance of 550au

As I watch the moon sink in the sky, am I witnessing the spin of the Earth?

Wouldn’t a white dwarf still have insanely powerful gravity that would crush any life that could be on it.

'Dwarves'. I know it's such a little thing, but I feel that it needed to be said. Sorry if I sound a bit short.

Dr. Simon Blouin says most Dwarf are cooled. Statistically, on how many Dwarf we have data.?

Plasma can be solid?

I’m not dead yet.

Hey you're just a couple hours drive from Victoria, you could have met in person?

The "just because it's a crystal and there's carbon doesn't make it a diamond" schpiel was quite endearing.

Could you put a little icon in the thumbnail so we can tell which videos are space bites, interviews, or q&a videos?

Could there be a habitual zone around a white dwarf

I agree that the neon 22 fall might contribute some energy to the white dwarf but I'm puzzled as to why the primary consideration isn't the enthalpy of fusion when you trans form from a liquid plasma into a solid plasma. All transitions from liquid to solid are significantly exothermic. I'm wondering if these guys are thinking too much like physicists and not enough like chemists. If I saw a container of hot liquid that suddenly stopped cooling down and kept a stable temperature, the first thing I would think of would be that some of it was solidifying.

post-mortem geochemistry :)

Wait. States of matter: solid, liquid, gas, plasma, etc. And, this guy is saying that a material can be a solid and a plasma simultaneously? That's confusing...

Did you mean "Metallic hydrogen" in the core of Jupiter?

How much of the original star mass is left? If the Earth survived our sun's conversion to a neutron star, where would the new orbit be?

I don't know if it can be measured with our current technology, but do white dwarves emit neutrinos?

Wouldn’t the UV radiation sterilize any planet orbiting the star, at least those not tidally locked?

"plasma can also be a solid" What?! thats crazy!.... this is news to me.... whats an example of a solid plasma? is he saying a white dwarf is a solid plasma?

Is Simon french or Canadian? His accent sounds like mine ^^'

1

@frasercain Question With the caveat - Not allowed to use previously used arguments to prove religion. In the court of law. Can science be proven it is not a religion ? Or will believing science always be doomed to a leap of faith ? Does this thought experiment intrigue a science communicator ? For context of my thinking this question up. It started after watching Bill Nye “the Science Guy” tours the Ark Encounter show / movie. How Ken Ham kept saying " Air Quotes "" Mainstream science " It felt like he was using his own life experience and personal beliefs (( like all of us do )). Mainstream science equals the Vatican's role in religion and the priest / monks job is to convince people of the Vatican's beliefs, making the scientists role to convince people science is correct. Because if religion is all muddled up with different kinds of religious beliefs, then science can be muddled in the same way i.e pseudoscience vs. science. Because I automatically think every science communicator has an explosive orgasm everytime they successfully interpret the usually bland science to a person in an easy and understandable way. Does this make it 1 of the scientist communicators holy grail questions ?

White dwarves

They prefer to be called little stars. Dwarfs is not politically correct 😂

you tried your best fraser, but the guy is hard to understand, and finishes sentences on a low quiet note,hope the guy learns to speak up and get some confidence in his voice.

The topic is interesting, and novel, but I'm giving the video a thumbs down for not editing the talking head (Blouin) ramblings down to ~5 minutes.

oh dear a video adding a new component to how we see things. His videos are also bloated like a star. Instead of a interview why Frasier just listen through this and present the NEWS in5 minutes?

🎵 Shine bright like a white dwarf🎵