A team of researchers have identified the coldest and faintest white dwarf star ever, which is estimated to be approximately 11-billion-years-old.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have identified an ancient stellar remnant believed to be so cold that its carbon has crystallized, which helped form an earth-sized diamond in space.
They were able to identify the dwarf by using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Green Bank Telescope and Very Long Baseline Array, according to a press release issued by the university.
"It's a really remarkable object," said study author David Kaplan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, according to RedOrbit.com. "These things should be out there, but because they are so dim they are very hard to find."
White dwarves, consisting of oxygen and carbon, are considered to be the remnants of a star like our Sun, which have diminished over billions of years.
Researchers were able to discover the new star by studying a pulsar companion to the white dwarf called PSR J2222-0137.
Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars.
Back in 2012, astronomer Adam Deller studied a pulsar that was some 900 light years away in the constellation Aquarius, according to the release.
Researchers examined how the gravity of the companion warped space, causing delays in the radio signal as the pulsar passed behind it by using Einstein's theory of relativity.
These delays helped the team figure out the orientation of their orbit and the masses of the two stars. The pulsar has a mass 1.2 times that of the Sun, while the companion has a mass 1.05 times larger, according to Phys.org.
Their data showed that the pulsar companion couldn't have been a second neutron star, since the orbits were too orderly for a second supernova to have occurred.
The astronomers believed they should have been able to observe the dwarf star in optical and infrared light. It helped knowing its location with such exact precision and how bright a white dwarf should appear at that distance, according to Phys.org.
Despite their efforts, they were not able to detect it by using both the Southern Astrophysical Research telescope in Chile and the Keck telescope in Hawaii.
"Our final image should show us a companion 100 times fainter than any other white dwarf orbiting a neutron star and about 10 times fainter than any known white dwarf, but we don't see a thing," said team member Bart Dunlap, according to Phys.org. "If there's a white dwarf there, and there almost certainly is, it must be extremely cold."
Researchers have determined that the dwarf star would be around 3,000 degrees Kelvin, approximately 2,700 degrees Celsius, according to
A study on the discovery was published in the Astrophysical Journal.
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