Physics of White Dwarfs :: physics space white dwarf star

A collision where one party collides with another and leaves the scene is considered to be illegal in the United States. If a white dwarf would collide with the sun this would be the exact case. It would take around an hour for the white dwarf to go completely through the sun and then after causing great destruction and changing the chemical and physical properties of the sun it would just continue on its path and leave behind massive destruction. The first time a white dwarf and main sequence collisions were studied it was done by Michael Shara, Giora Shaviv and Oded Regev at Tel Aviv University and then Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. These scientists use supercomputers to study the effects of various collisions. They concluded that if a sun like star was hit by a white dwarf 10 million times as dense, the sun like star would be destroyed and only minor warming would take place on the outside of the white dwarf. If the sun were to go through this type of collision it would not annihilate the earth but would cause all the water in both the atmosphere and in the oceans to boil away. No longer having the gravitational pull of the sun, the earth and other planets would wonder the galaxy. The Pauli exclusion principle is defined by Dr. Steven S. Zumdahl, "In a given atom no two electrons can have the same set of four quantum numbers." Due to this principle, only two electrons can inhabit a single energy level. The electrons that share the same energy level have opposite intrinsic angular momentums which is more commonly known as "spin". To determine the direction of the spin the angular momentum vector is analyzed. A degenerate gas where the electrons exist in the lowest allowed energy level. Degeneracy pressure is caused by a degenerate gas. A degenerate gas is different from an ordinary gas because their electrons have much greater energies and higher momentums. The higher energy and momentum is the cause of the increase in pressure. The increase in pressure results in the electrons being in a higher state than what would be predicted. A white dwarf uses electron degeneracy pressure to support itself. It is because of the electron degeneracy pressure that white dwarfs have a small size relative to other types of stars.