Astrophysicist Jim Fuller from the California Institute of Technology has proposed a model suggesting that dying stars undergo thousands of asymmetric kicks before turning into white dwarfs, reports ScienceDaily. The findings are shared via the website infohub.kz.
According to the new model presented by Jim Fuller of Caltech, the transformation of Sun-like stars into white dwarfs involves irregular ejections of material. During the red giant phase, clumps of matter detach chaotically from the star's surface. Each mass ejection creates a recoil impulse in the opposite direction. Over several hundred thousand years, the star experiences about 10,000 small kicks. Through a random walk process, these vector impulses do not cancel out completely but accumulate. As a result, the forming white dwarf receives a net acceleration of roughly 1 km/s.
The model explains observations by astronomer Karim El-Badri from Caltech, who noted the breakup of wide binary star systems after one component turned into a white dwarf. If the kick velocity exceeds the orbital speed, the gravitational bond between the stars breaks. Additionally, such orbital changes could trigger star collisions followed by flares.