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."

Comments

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.