In reading the article,"Green, Pink, and Purple—Astronomers reveal the surprising two colors of white dwarf stars." we find that a group of astronomers from the University of Warwick have shown that a white dwarf star can glow really in a whole variety of colors, including the first star that we ever found that if we could see it with our eyes, but actually appeared green. It's really cool.\
Most stars' color is a guide, really, to their temperature. Cooler stars will look orange, stars like our Sun will look white and the hottest stars—they're going to glow a pale blue.
It's kind of like a blacksmith's iron-glowing red, then orange, then white-hot as it heats up. That's the analogy they use in the article. White dwarf stars: the dense remnants left behind when sun-like stars reach the end of their lives, were thought to follow the same kind of rule.
They earned their name because the earliest examples found they were surprisingly hot and glowed this white, pale blue. So astronomers called them white dwarf stars.
But the real question that this paper answered: are orange, white, and blue the only colors a star in the night sky can be, especially a white dwarf? So the answer they found, and what they quote here, is most stars—including 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 Dr. Mark Hollands, Prize Fellow in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Group, University of Warwick, who led this work.
And turns out, he said, "that these incredibly dense stars can produce colors nobody detected and some of them generally surprised him."
So why do white dwarf stars break the rule? Watch the video or go over to Eadsy Astronomy at the link below to learn more!
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