The first green star

RNZ reports on the discovery of an astronomical first, as astronomers used to identifying red giants, black holes, white dwarfs, and stars of a few other colors, reveal the first star that’s green:

While for most stars, colour is temperature-dependent and limited to a few hues, white dwarfs, which are the dense remnants of sun-like stars that have died, can glow in an incredible range of colours, said lead study author Mark Hollands, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick, England, on Thursday.

“The colours that normal stars can have are pretty much only orange, white or blue,” Hollands told CNN.

“What we found is, for most white dwarfs, that’s the same as well. But there are some special cases where the physics in the outer layers of these stars are sufficiently strange that it causes actually quite big deviations in terms of their spectrum,” he said.