Astronomers have made an unprecedented discovery concerning white dwarfs, the remnants of burnt-out cores of deceased stars.

For the first time, they have found a two-faced member within this cosmic family, where one side of the white dwarf is predominantly composed of hydrogen, while the other side is predominantly made up of helium.

Ilaria Caiazzo, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, who leads the new study published in the journal Nature, expressed amazement at the surface transformation of the white dwarf from one side to the other, leaving those who see the observations astonished.

White dwarfs are the incredibly hot remnants of stars that were once similar to our sun, Phys .Org has reported.

As stars age, they expand into red giants, eventually shedding their outer fluffy layers, leading to the formation of dense and intensely hot white dwarfs. In approximately 5 billion years, our sun will also evolve into a white dwarf.

This newfound white dwarf, affectionately nicknamed Janus after the two-faced Roman god of transition, was initially identified by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), an instrument continuously scanning the skies from Caltech’s Palomar Observatory near San Diego.

Written by staff