White Dwarfs Come in Pink, Purple and What May Be the First Green Star

Ask a kid to draw a star and you'll get yellow. Ask an astronomer to describe a white dwarf and you'll get, reasonably, white. It turns out a few of these stars never read their own name tag.

Astronomers at the University of Warwick in England worked out what white dwarf stars would look like to human eyes up close. Some came out green, pink, purple, cyan or yellow.¹ One of them, a star with the unforgettable name WD J1330+6435, may be the first known star that would look genuinely green.¹³

The work was led by Dr. Mark Hollands, a Warwick Prize Fellow in the university's Astronomy and Astrophysics Group. It was published Oct. 14, 2026, in the journal RAS Techniques and Instruments.¹²

Nobody Took a Photo (Space Is Big)

These colors are not snapshots. The stars are far too distant to see directly, which is a polite way of saying your phone camera was not invited.

Instead, the team took measurements of each star's light and ran them through models of how human eyes see color. Hollands says the method is well established. It's the same color science that digital cameras and screens rely on.²

Normally, a star's color is a simple story about how hot it is. Hollands explained why that left room for surprises:

"Most stars, including most white dwarfs, behave like 'perfect radiators,' so their color is set almost entirely by temperature. But nobody had really looked into what else might be possible for white dwarfs," said Hollands, in the university's announcement.¹

How a Star Turns Green: Eat Your Neighbors

WD J1330+6435 is a cool white dwarf, about 7,200 °F (4,000 °C). That counts as cool only in the sense that a star uses the word.¹

Over time it has pulled sodium-rich rocky material from its own planetary system into its atmosphere.¹² (Presumably the planets did not consent to this.)

In an ordinary star, sodium absorbs just a thin slice of orange light. But this star's atmosphere is so dense that its sodium soaks up a wide sweep of yellow, orange and red. Take those away, and what's left looks green.¹²

Hollands says the sodium atoms are constantly bombarded by the helium atoms around them. Through quantum effects, that jostling shifts sodium's energy levels and widens what it can absorb.² Basically, sodium is trying to do one job while helium elbows it nonstop, and the result is a whole new color.

A Full Paint Aisle, Mostly Stocked in White

Green wasn't the only oddball. WD J1011+2845, about 48 light-years away, could be among the reddest stars ever recorded. Carbon on its surface gives it a deep salmon-pink look.²

Other carbon-rich white dwarfs can look pink or purple. Ones dusted with debris from shattered asteroids and comets tend to look yellow. Some cooler stars with hydrogen or helium atmospheres come out cyan or pale blue.²

Before anyone repaints the night sky, though: of 151 nearby white dwarfs the team studied, only five had unusual colors. That's roughly one in 30.²⁵ Professor Boris Gänsicke of Warwick's Department of Physics put it in perspective:

"One in thirty might not sound like a huge fraction, but across the entire population of white dwarfs in the Universe, that is still a lot of oddly coloured stars out there."⁶

The typical nearby white dwarf has a color temperature of about 6,800 kelvin (kelvin is the temperature scale astronomers use), which our eyes read as white.⁴⁶ As Gänsicke said in the university's release, "the average white dwarf really is white."⁶ The name stays. Mostly.

Hollands was candid about the results: "It turns out these incredibly dense stars can produce colours nobody expected, and some of them genuinely surprised me."³

He says the finding doesn't change the existing physics of white dwarfs. What it adds is a picture. Elements in a white dwarf's atmosphere can reveal leftover rocky debris from old planetary systems, offering clues to what those systems were made of. Now astronomers can connect that material to a color a person can actually imagine.²

So kids, keep the yellow crayon. Just maybe set the green one nearby, in case a star finishes eating its neighbors.