The Universe Is Too Young for This Star to Exist

There is a dead star the universe is not old enough to have made yet.

It is called a black dwarf, the cold final corpse of a white dwarf. As far as we know, not a single one exists anywhere.

When a star like the Sun dies, it leaves a white dwarf: an Earth-sized core with no fuel left. It cannot make new heat, so it does the only thing it can: cool, radiating warmth into space. The universe is about fourteen billion years old. A white dwarf needs closer to a quadrillion years to fade completely to black. So every white dwarf ever formed is still glowing, still warm. The black dwarf is defined entirely by physics we have never seen, because time itself has not caught up to it.

When the first black dwarf forms, the universe will be so old that nearly every other star has already burned out. It goes dark in a cosmos already dark.

Follow The Cosmic Vault — the universe is stranger than you think.