Stars, like living organisms, have distinct life cycles. They are born, achieve maturity and then dieoften in spectacular fashion. Death inevitably comes when a star has finally exhausted its nuclear fuel. As the stellar fires go out, the cooling gases begin to rush inward, falling toward the star's center under the force of its enormous gravity. For one class of stars, each about the mass of the sun, the end product of this gravitational collapse is a small, glowing cinder called a "white dwarf." Not much larger than the earth, it is so densely compressed that a cubic inch of its...
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