Hypothetical star
A hypothetical star is a type of star that is speculated to exist but has yet to be definitively observed. Scientifically speculated hypothetical stars include:
- Black dwarf, the final state for a star, like the Sun, that is too small to become either a black hole or a neutron star. It would take a star like our Sun roughly a quadrillion years to reach this state, so none are believed to exist today.
- Black star, a star predicted in semiclassical gravity which collapses into a black hole state but has neither a gravitational singularity nor an event horizon.
- Boson star, a star made of bosons, such as photons or gluons, rather than conventional matter
- Dark energy star, a conjectured alternative to a black hole
- Fuzzball: a formulation of black holes in string theory
- Gravastar, an alternative to a black hole that denies the possibility of a singularity
- Intermediate mass black hole: a black hole that is roughly a few thousand times the mass of the Sun; thus larger than a stellar mass black hole yet smaller than a supermassive black hole
- Iron star, a final state for a star in the far future of the universe, when all matter is transmuted to iron via quantum tunnelling
- Magnetospheric eternally collapsing object: a hypothetical alternative to black holes
- Population III star: stars virtually free of metals believed to have existed in the early universe.
- Q star, a type of heavy neutron star
- Quark star, a star composed of strange matter
- Quasistar, a star from the early universe with a black hole at its centre
- White hole, the polar opposite of a black hole, it ejects matter from its core into space.
Specific hypothetical stars include:
See also