The white dwarf star Janus is located 1,000 light-years from Earth. One side is covered in hydrogen and the other is covered in helium.

Scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, recently discovered an unprecedented white dwarf star, write: Watchman. According to astronomers’ measurements, one side of the celestial body is almost entirely hydrogen, and the other is helium.

According to Ilaria Kayazu, an astrophysicist on the team and lead of the study, this is the first documented case of a solitary star with this strange property. The specialist says everyone who shows him their records is incredulous. The post about this is on file nature-in Back.

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The celestial body is located about 1000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. They named him Janus, after the two-faced Roman god. It is officially named ZTF J203349.8 + 322901.1.





Caiazzo was looking for white dwarfs, and one candidate stood out because it changes in brightness very quickly. Further observations revealed that Janus rotates on its axis every 15 minutes. Based on spectrometric tests, it was found that one side is almost entirely hydrogen, while the other is almost entirely helium.

If we look closely, everything will be bluish: on one side the surface will look like the sun, on the other it will paint a smoother picture. The latter is the hydrogen side. According to Caiazzo, the existence of the star is difficult to explain, since gases must essentially mix with each other.

According to the explanation, Janus is going through a rare metamorphosis associated with the evolution of a white dwarf.





White dwarfs are remnants of stars that were once similar to the Sun. As stars age, they swell into a red giant, eventually shedding their outer atmosphere and the core shrinking into a hot, dense white dwarf: roughly the size of Earth and the mass of the Sun.

Caiazzo believes that not all white dwarfs will be dominated by helium instead of hydrogen, so it is possible to find such a star. If this is indeed the case, then, according to experts, the matter on the star could split in two due to the asymmetric magnetic field.

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