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  • CfA Astronomers Play Key Role in New Dark Energy Results

    New results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration

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  • CfA Scientists Play Important Role in New NASA Mission

    A new NASA mission with major roles from scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

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  • Runaway Stars Reveal Hidden Black Hole In Milky Way’s Nearest Neighbor

    CfA astronomers have found strong evidence for a supermassive black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way

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Neutron Stars and White Dwarfs

When stars die, their fate is determined by how massive they were in life. Stars like our Sun leave behind white dwarfs: Earth-size remnants of the original star’s core. More massive stars explode as supernovas, while their cores collapse into neutron stars: ultra-dense, fast-spinning spheres made of the same ingredients as the nucleus of an atom. At least some neutron stars are pulsars, which produce powerful beams of light, which as they sweep across our view from Earth look like extremely regular flashes.

Small as they are, the deaths of these compact objects change the chemistry of the universe. The supernova explosions of white dwarfs and the collisions of neutron stars create new elements on the periodic table. For all these reasons, white dwarfs and neutron stars are important laboratories for physics at the extremes of strong gravity, density, and temperature.

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