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Re:We've spotted a planet surviving its dying star by kadoban on Friday October 15, 2021 @09:28AM (#28877458)
You'd probably also be able to see white dwarves that were on their way to being black (whatever the threshold is).
Re:We've spotted a planet surviving its dying star by Chris2048 on Friday October 15, 2021 @01:14PM (#28880221)
Given there are no BDs (so they are theoretical) maybe there isn't a threshold defined?

A WD will slowly cool to a BD over Trillions of years, so it's all linear. Funnily enough, they are probably every shade of red/brown in-between - but "brown dwarves" are usually reserved for objects that never where "proper" hydrogen-fusing stars, but are large enough to fuse deuterium.

Re:We've spotted a planet surviving its dying star by kijin on Friday October 15, 2021 @12:20PM (#28879487)
There's no hard threshold, the star just fades gradually from #FFF to #000.

A fully black dwarf would be so cold it would be indistinguishable from cosmic background radiation, but that's going to take at least a trillion times longer than the current age of the universe. Not just slightly longer.

Re:We've spotted a planet surviving its dying star by kadoban on Friday October 15, 2021 @01:02PM (#28880084)
Right. I'm just saying that if the are any black dwarfs (which there should not be), we should be able to find ~arbitrarily dim ones as well, down to our ability to see.