THE FASTEST SPINNING WHITE DWARF..

White dwarfs are some of the strangest objects in the universe.

The leftover cores from sunlike stars, white dwarfs live for trillions of years through the support of fascinating quantum physics. Astronomers recently spotted perhaps the strangest one yet: a dead star the spins twice a second, sucking down the stuff from a nearby companion as it goes.

The strange about J2056: It's an intermediate polar system, which means that gas from its companion star can form an accretion disk around the white dwarf, but it has trouble making it to the white dwarf's surface. According to the authors of the study, this white dwarf is only capable of accumulating about the equivalent of Earth's atmosphere every year, which as these systems go isn't all that much.

J2056 isn't releasing a lot of X-ray radiation, which is also atypical of these kinds of systems.

J2056 is spinning. Fast. It's the fastest-known confirmed white dwarf, clocking in at a rotation period of roughly 29 seconds per revolution.

So how did J2056 get so fast? It could be that the configuration of its magnetic fields are just right and therefore able to pull the material down onto its surface in quick spurts, accelerating the white dwarf like a stellar carousel. But its magnetic fields aren't powerful enough to slow down the rotation through electromagnetic interactions with the surrounding accretion disk.

Still, the relative dimness of its X-rays and the supremely fast orbit of its companion (it orbits once every 1.76 hours) remain to be explained.

J2056 could represent a brand-new class of cataclysmic variable stars, or it could be just a complete oddball. Either way, understanding how it works could help us to understand how magnetic fields operate around white dwarfs, which is important for understanding how they live and how they are born.

The study has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and was posted online July 28 to the preprint server arXiv.org.