White dwarf
type of stellar remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter
A white dwarf is a very dense type of star: in an Earth-sized volume, it packs a mass that is comparable to the Sun. A white dwarf radiates light from residual heat and eventual crystallization, not from nuclear fusion. Stars like the Sun, whose mass is not high enough to collapse into a neutron star or black hole, are expected to become white dwarf stars later in their evolution. The nearest known white dwarf is Sirius B, at 8.6 light years, the smaller component of the Sirius binary star.
In 1910, Henry Norris Russell, Edward Charles Pickering and Williamina Fleming discovered that, despite being a dim star, 40 Eridani B was of spectral type A, or white. This would become known as the first white dwarf. The name white dwarf was coined by Willem Jacob Luyten in 1922. In 1931 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar developed a physical model of white dwarfs and he won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for studies in the evolution of stars.
These compact stars are composed mostly of a highly compressed form of matter. The composition of the white dwarf produced will depend on the initial mass of the star.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “White dwarf” is type of stellar remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through White, dwarf and type, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5871. The Library of Congress control number is sh85146472. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1910, 1922, 1931 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “White dwarf” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.