"...Could they be so determined to expand the wormhole because they need to send something enormous through? Something that could settle everything in one blow?"
Alsace's earlier speculation suddenly resurfaced in Gilad's mind, making his expression shift several times.
Meanwhile, Nie Yun was also staring in astonishment at the strange celestial body glowing white, recalling what he knew about white dwarfs.
Such celestial bodies were actually fairly common in the universe.
After low- and intermediate-mass stars passed through the main-sequence phase of their lives, they would expand into red giants. One example was... the Sun!
Billions of years later, the Sun would leave the main sequence and expand into an enormous red giant, swallowing Mercury, Venus, and perhaps even Earth.
The searing heat would turn Earth into a realm of magma, a wasteland where no life could survive. At that point, we would have two choices: migrate to another planet, or turn Earth into a wandering planet...
The core of the red giant Sun would continue contracting while its outer shells kept burning. Then, through a series of thermal pulses, it would shed its outer layers, forming a brilliant nebula around it.
The burning remnant it finally left behind... would be the white dwarf we saw!
White dwarfs were usually composed of carbon and oxygen. During their formation, rapid gravitational collapse crushed their atoms, producing degenerate matter made up of atomic nuclei and electrons. This gave them an astonishing density.
Even the "pocket-sized" white dwarf before them, only 180 kilometers in diameter, was far more massive than an ordinary celestial body.
Only around three percent of all stars were white dwarfs, and they were quite distant from the Solar System, so this was Nie Yun's first time seeing one up close with his own eyes.
"This thing... what exactly are