White dwarfs cool for billions of years
White dwarfs, the dense remnants of Sun-like stars, cool incredibly slowly over billions of years, serving as cosmic clocks for astronomers.
Imagine a star's leftover core, about Earth's size but with the Sun's mass. That's a white dwarf, the dense remnant of stars like our Sun. These stellar embers start incredibly hot, over 100,000 Kelvin, but without nuclear fusion, they slowly radiate away their heat into space.
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