Oldest white dwarf star catches amateur's eye – and its dusty ring leaves boffins baffled An amateur astronomer has discovered the oldest-known white dwarf star, sitting 145 light years away from Earth in the Capricornus constellation. Melina Thévenot volunteered to help NASA hunt for brown dwarfs by analysing grainy images of candidate stars taken by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope as part …
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They never make the connection between magnetic fields, radiation belts and rings. A strong enough magnetic field around a body will suck ionised gas into a ring about it. The gas will drag dust with it, because that's what plasma tend to do. Whit dwarfs have some of the more powerful magnetic field out there, do the fact that this one we can see up close has a ring should not be remotely a surprise.
However there is no evidence to suggest that white dwarfs have a magnetic field string enough to do what you suggest; in fact the evidence to date says that whire dwarg magnetic fields are no stronger than that of the parent star.
Could you be thinking of neutron stars that do have strong magnetic fields (at least when they are relatively young)?
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Not the " oldest-known white dwarf star", but as mentioned later "almost three times older than any other white dwarf known to have a dusty disk around it."
White dwarfs without a ring can be much older.
Gliese 223.2 is only 21 light years away ad is nearly 8 billion years old. The oldest known white dwarfs are around 12 billion years old.
When articles such as these show an 'artist's conception' I often find myself wondering - how well versed are said artists in astronomical phenomena?
Have they just been told 'there's a shiny bit in the middle and kind of a cloud around it' or do they actually know something about the subject?
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