and is freely available to the general public here [0], under the Creative Commons license. (OP press release only linked to a paywall).
[0] https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2029380/v1.pdf
Wicked cool! The article goes on to explain that it may be due to a difference in the strength of the magnetic fields on either side of the star...
I might be mis-remembering from astronomy class ( long ago now ) but I'd thought that these transitions usually happen very quickly -- it's interesting that we can just watch it go!
If you were an Astrologer, it would likely lend less credence to your comment. :)
Maybe it's a planet that had its atmosphere ignited? That way it could have a super strong magnetic (iron) core while the exterior would appear like that of a white dwarf. This would explain a magnetic field that's strong enough to keep the two elements in alignment, matching the poles.
The sci-fi fan in me wants to believe that a super advanced alien race did this on purpose so they could make a giant generator out of it. I mean, it fully rotates every 15 seconds which would be a pretty damned good alternating current if you surrounded it with a lot of ferromagnetic wire.
Another reason why one might do this on purpose is to make an "anchor" or clock of sorts that gives off easily detectable gravitational waves from a great distance. As the helium side would have more mass than the hydrogen side and thus the gravity surrounding the object would be regularly rising and falling along its rotational axis.
Should we find more astronomical objects like this in the future we should check to see if they are aligned in any way that would make it easy to navigate your way through the celestial area like an enormous set of GPS satellites.
Because a white dwarf is about 250,000 times as dense as a planet, with the associated higher gravity, which you can measure at distance. And the magnetic field looks to be a couple of orders of magnitude higher than you could get from a 'normal matter' iron core, no matter how fast you spin it. And the hydrogen and helium are fusing, not burning, and planets don't seem to support that (try as we might here on earth). So...pretty clear it's not a planet.
1) We can only estimate gravitational fields remotely when objects are interacting, by measuring the time it takes them to orbit each other - the article specifically says that the object is "floating alone in space".
2) The paper (https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-2029380/v1_covere...) discusses the possibility of a magnetic field being responsible for the two-sided effect, but doesn't mention that they specifically measured it. Apparently measurement is possible for large magnetic fields by looking for circular polarisation but I don't think they have found that in this case.
3) There is no fusion happening in a white dwarf - they glow with residual heat from the original star.
Wikipedia has a lot of detail in their article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf
a) That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to when you could surely directly harvest the energy of a star much more easily, and use that to drive whatever machinery you wanted to build.
b) How would one ignite an atmosphere and once having done so, keep it burning? Would it not all burn up in a short time? Say a few weeks at most?
c) You can't fool a spectrum - the light coming from such an object would indicate its chemical composition; if it looks like primarily H and He then that's what it is. Planetary atmospheres tend to be low in those elements because they get blown away over time.
d) As another commenter points out, the magnetic field of a planet is tiny in comparison to that required for the effect the paper is postulating - Earth's magnetic field strength for example is less than 1 gauss, whereas the scientists here are suggesting fields of a few thousands to a million gauss. Still not that high for a stellar object, but very high for a planet.
Of course I'd love for us to find evidence of aliens - but I don't think this is it.
