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AdamAutism1998
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I'm curious. I want to model it to understand stellar evolution better. Does anyone know what the most massive single white dwarf is?
Okrootone said:We can't see every star in the galaxy so there can be no certain answer.
However, white dwarfs do have an an upper limit to their mass known as the chandrasankar limit.
If a white dwarf exceeds that mass it will become unstable and will detonate - a type 1a supernova.
rootone said:We can't see every star in the galaxy so there can be no certain answer.
However, white dwarfs do have an an upper limit to their mass known as the chandrasekar limit.
If a white dwarf exceeds that mass it will become unstable and will detonate - a type 1a supernova.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit
Is that value applicable to a nonrotating white dwarf, or a rapidly rotating one?newjerseyrunner said:About 1.38 times the mass of the sun is the largest for any galaxy; any bigger and it would explode.
Need an astrophysicist for that one, I have no idea. Is it possible for a white dwarf to not rotate? Usually highly compressed objects rotate like a bat out of hell to conserve angular momentum as it got crushed.snorkack said:Is that value applicable to a nonrotating white dwarf, or a rapidly rotating one?
In http and //arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0301539, White Dwarf Rotation: Observations and Theory, the author notes:snorkack said:Is that value applicable to a nonrotating white dwarf, or a rapidly rotating one?
A white dwarf is a small, dense star that is the leftover remnant of a low or medium mass star after it has exhausted its nuclear fuel and shed its outer layers.
A white dwarf can become more massive if it accretes material from a companion star or merges with another white dwarf. However, there is a limit to how massive a white dwarf can be, known as the Chandrasekhar limit, which is about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun.
The current record holder is a white dwarf known as J0740+6620, which has a mass of about 2.27 times the mass of the Sun.
The most massive white dwarf was discovered using the Green Bank Telescope and the Very Large Array, which detected the radio emission from the white dwarf's strong magnetic field.
It is unlikely that there are significantly more massive white dwarfs in the Milky Way. The Chandrasekhar limit is a physical limit that prevents white dwarfs from becoming more massive, and there is no evidence to suggest that this limit can be exceeded.