Helium White Dwarf Stars Bear New Quasiparticle 28
eldavojohn writes "Helium white dwarf stars are now theorized to produce a new kind of quasiparticle that would explain a known temperature anomaly between helium white dwarfs and vanilla white dwarfs (lumps of charcoal). Since helium can form a Bose-Einstein condensate and there are extra constraints inside such a dense object, a new quasiparticle emerges. Researchers' models claim it 'reduces the specific heat of the white dwarf core by two orders of magnitude compared to a crystalline core.' But even with that figured in, measurements of some nearby ancient helium white dwarfs show that they don't fit the specific temperature curve exactly. So, some questions remain, with the possible explanation that these stars undergo internal transition late in their age. The heavy reading is available on the prepublication site arXiv."
Re:Anyone else get the feeling (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really. The group is basically extrapolating the known behaviour of Bose-Einstein condensates (known to form from helium) in the conditions that may be present inside a helium white dwarf. The fact that you think they're just throwing their hands in the air and making things up out of whole cloth I find rather disturbing.
Cooling rates (Score:2, Interesting)
White dwarf cooling rates impose interesting constraints on physics beyond the standard model. A change in the phase diagram for stellar cores may have interesting effects on what we know about dark matter and dark energy.