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Two Earth-Sized Bodies With Oxygen-Rich Atmospheres
tugfoigel writes "Astrophysicists at the University of Warwick and Kiel University have discovered two bodies the size of earth with oxygen-rich atmospheres — however, there is a disappointing snag for anyone looking for a potential home for alien life, or even a future home for ourselves. These are not planets, but are actually two unusual white dwarf stars." The objects, 220 and 400 light-years distant, are believed to be remnants of stars between 7 and 10 solar masses. Such stars, the largest that evolve to white dwarves, have been sought for years. If the stars were a little more massive they would collapse to neutron stars, or so the theory goes. Here is the paper on the arXiv.
There's already one rule 34 response to your comment; I anticipate more are on the way.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
"White dwarfs" is the proper plural form when talking about more than one white dwarf star.
Pish, putting a spin on things is old news. If you own a NIV Bible, congrats, you already own a book where theologians twist the source material to censor embarrassing verses.
Take Songs 5:4 for example:
Young's Literal Version My beloved sent his hand from the net-work[probably something with threads], And my bowels were moved for him. New International Version My lover thrust his hand through the latch-opening; my heart began to pound for him. The Interpretation Read it yourself here.It's like taking "You idiot, you aren't wearing a condom!" and publishing it as "Dear, your pen is uncapped." on the virtue that "pen is" remotely looks like "penis" which, when substituted, gives a meaning similar to the original.
the estimated masses are around one solar mass, which means they are no where near earth-sized
From the Wiki article: "[White dwarfs] are very dense; a white dwarf's mass is comparable to that of the Sun and its volume is comparable to that of the Earth."
Be very careful about calling other people stupid when you're about to say something demonstrably false.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Not quite so small, as the Schwarzschild radius of the sun is about 3 km.
Actually, it's believed that type 1A supernovae do not reach gravitational collapse, they explode in a runaway carbon fusion before reaching the Chandrasekar limit. It's type II supernovae that explode the way you mention.