Astronomers Discover New Class of Pulsating Star

KentuckyFC writes "It doesn't happen very often but astronomers have discovered a new class of pulsating white dwarf. The work began last year when the Sloan Digital Sky Survey found a few exotic white dwarf stars with carbon atmospheres. A mathematical model of these stars showed that in some circumstances the dwarfs could pulsate as the carbon was cycled through the atmosphere by convection. Now a few days observation of one of these stars has shown that it does actually pulsate as predicted."

oh wow!

[vajaradakini]

I wonder how this sort of star came about? I haven't read through the entire article (well, the one that's actually going in the scientific journal not the condensed version that's linked), but it seems really interesting.

Of course I also didn't know that white dwarfs pulsated at all, I generally thought of them as these little lumps of carbon that just cooled down. Does anyone know if the pulsations are due to the star cooling and contracting as it does so (I know this is a likely cause for neutron stars' "starquakes" so it could be an analogous process but on a smaller scale) or if it's something else?

Re:"A fly in the ointment"

[Changa_MC]

We've never seen a pulsating carbon convection star, but we've also never actually seen a binary white dwarf that looks like this. Both are highly complicated systems and neither is inherently more complex than the other.

And the first gets +1 cool, where the second gets a -1 redundant. That's at least as important as any other rating system right now.