One White Dwarf Is Green. Another Is Salmon Pink.

Park a spaceship close enough to WD J1330+6435 to see its disc, and this dead star would glow chartreuse. As far as the astronomers who studied it know, no other star of any kind has been claimed to shine green. Not every white dwarf, it seems, got the memo about the name.

White dwarfs are the dense cores most stars leave behind when they die. Mark Hollands and colleagues asked what color they would look to a human eye up close. Telescope photos can't say, because their colors are often picked for science over accuracy. So the team ran starlight through the color science your monitor uses.

Most behave. Across all 152 white dwarfs within about 65 light-years of the sun, the typical one landed very near the white your screen is calibrated to. The researchers called the familiar blue-tinted portrait unrepresentative.

Then come the oddballs. Some of the coolest white dwarfs have atmospheres so crushed and dense that sodium, calcium and carbon smear their absorption across huge stretches of the rainbow. Carbon-rich stars came out pink and purple. LHS 2229 is a deep salmon, probably the reddest-looking star on record. WD J1330+6435 turns green because sodium soaks up orange light and calcium soaks up violet, leaving a peak near 500 nanometers. WD J2356-2054 loses so much of the middle of the spectrum to sodium that it shines vivid blue at just 4,000 kelvins, about 6,740 F or 3,730 C.

The green verdict leans partly on a somewhat noisy spectrum, though an older model produced a similar hue.

Sodium painted one dead star green and another blue. Somewhere between them, the researchers suspect, cyan and green siblings are waiting for a survey to spot them.

Read the full story at RAS Techniques and Instruments, October 15, 2026

Hot Take: Every textbook diagram that colored white dwarfs blue has earned a red pen. The green one, meanwhile, has earned a crayon of its own.