{"id":939068,"date":"2026-10-19T17:52:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T17:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/939068\/"},"modified":"2026-10-19T17:52:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T17:52:13","slug":"astronomers-say-theyve-discovered-the-first-green-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/939068\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers say they\u2019ve discovered the first green star"},"content":{"rendered":"

Astronomers analyzing white dwarf stars have for the first time found a star that would appear green to human eyes, according to a new study.<\/p>\n

While for most stars, color is temperature-dependent and limited to a few hues, white dwarfs, which are the dense remnants of sun-like stars that have died, can glow in an incredible range of colors, said lead study author Mark Hollands, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick, England, on Thursday.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe colors that normal stars can have are pretty much only orange, white or blue,\u201d Hollands told CNN.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we found is, for most white dwarfs, that\u2019s the same as well. But there are some special cases where the physics in the outer layers of these stars are sufficiently strange that it causes actually quite big deviations in terms of their spectrum,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

These deviations are due to the interaction between the helium in their atmosphere and traces of other elements, which vary between white dwarfs, depending on what material has interacted with the star over the course of its lifetime.<\/p>\n

For instance, iron, magnesium and sodium, elements commonly found in rocks, can be found on the surface \u2014 potential evidence of a nearby former planetary system, or from \u201csomething like an asteroid that ventures too close to the white dwarf,\u201d Hollands explained.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt gets shredded up into dust, and then those rocky bits of dust and debris fall onto the white dwarf,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then that gets mixed into the outer layers, and then you can actually use that to measure what the rocky stuff was made off,\u201d Hollands said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we can actually use the white dwarf as a sort of diagnostic tool to actually measure the chemistry of planetary material,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe white dwarf is taking apart the planets, and we\u2019re able to see what was actually inside that planet \u2014 the proportion of the different elements \u2014 and that gives us clues in how these planets were formed,\u201d said Adam Burgasser, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California San Diego. \u201cIt is a crime scene, and we\u2019re kind of piecing through the evidence that we have left available to us, and that\u2019s allowing us to kind of piece the story of what the planet was and how it was made way, way, way back in in history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Human connection<\/p>\n

For this study, Hollands looked at the 151 known white dwarf stars that are within 20 parsecs, or around 65 light years, of Earth.<\/p>\n

As for the green star, the main elements present are calcium, sodium and lithium, Hollands said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt kind of stimulated interest in me in looking more at that object and why it has so much material being accreted onto it,\u201d said Burgasser, who was not involved in the study. \u201cIt can excite the public as well as the scientists in learning more about some of the more, I would say, extreme objects in this sample.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another notable star was \u201calmost like a salmon pink,\u201d due to the presence of a high density of carbon molecules, Hollands added.<\/p>\n

While no white dwarf stars can be seen directly from Earth, Hollands was able to calculate their color using star spectrum data, which a statement from the researchers defines as \u201cthe \u2018fingerprint\u2019 produced when starlight is split apart by wavelength, much like a prism splits sunlight into a rainbow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hollands explained that the research has also brought these space objects much closer to home.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt gives you a nice human connection to these very distant things that are so far away that sometimes even as a researcher you feel quite disconnected from these objects that you study,\u201d he said. \u201cBut then you can sort of add a human element into it and it feels a lot more tangible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The observations about the green star are based on existing data and may not shed new understandings about white dwarfs, but the study does offer an intriguing approach and view of these celestial bodies, said Agn\u00e8s Kim, an astrophysicist and professor of physics at Penn State Scranton, who was not involved in the work.<\/p>\n

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\u201cDoing a study that goes from spectrum to what the human eye would see is a cool intersection of physics and biology to me,\u201d Kim wrote in an email. \u201cI love that some would look green to us if they were close enough for us to see them, and even more fun that some would look pink.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burgasser added that the study\u2019s categorization scheme using temperatures and atmospheric properties can be useful for the field moving forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome things are kind of purplish pink, and some other things were greenish and blue \u2014 and that kind of classification, which by the way we do all the time in astronomy, is classify things, allows us to focus on: why are these types of objects these colors, and are they related to each other based on their composition?\u201d Burgasser said. \u201cWe have that information in other forms, but I think this is maybe a simplified way of organizing that data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Next, Hollands is planning to keep analyzing more white dwarf star spectra, with advances in scientific techniques meaning that researchers will be able to look at a new tranche of stars that are even farther away from Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know of white dwarfs that we don\u2019t have spectra for,\u201d he said, \u201cbut that\u2019s all about to change because there\u2019s quite a few spectroscopic surveys\u201d that are going to start delivering data.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll be getting a tenfold increase in the number of white dwarfs that have spectra,\u201d Hollands said. \u201cAnd so maybe if we\u2019re lucky, we\u2019ll go from one or maybe two green white dwarfs to 10 or 20.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study was published in the journal RAS Techniques and Instruments, or RASTI.<\/p>\n

The-CNN-Wire\u2122 & \u00a9 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Astronomers analyzing white dwarf stars have for the first time found a star that would appear green to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":939069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-939068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=939068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/939069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=939068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=939068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=939068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}