
Look closely: dozens of faint white dwarf stars are hidden among the bright stars of globular cluster NGC 6397, as seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image. A new study of star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds seeks to find the most massive white dwarfs, which may hold the key to determining which stars end their lives in fiery supernovae and which live out their final days as cooling black dwarfs. You can learn more about this study — and the first detection of extragalactic white dwarfs — in our AAS Nova highlight and the corresponding research article in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. [NASA, ESA, and H. Richer (University of British Columbia)]
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