Astronomers just directly measured the mass of a lone white dwarf using the Hubble Space Telescope for the first time. The dwarf—the core remnant of a star—is named LAWD 37, and it burned out about a billion years ago.
The universe has no shortage of oddities, and researchers at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab have observed another one in the form of a particular binary star system. The system, called CPD-29 2176, will eventually trigger a kilonova, a celestial event in which two neutron stars collide in a massive…