White Dwarf 529 is a Halloween special with a Gitz vs Skaven trick-or-treat battle report, on pre-order from 3 October. Ideal for a club's Halloween night.

Astronomers have discovered a white dwarf star, RXJ0528+2838, located approximately 730 light-years from Earth, that is producing a powerful shock wave without the presence of a disk, which contradicts established astronomical theories. The star, a remnant of a low-mass star that has exhausted its nuclear fuel, orbits a Sun-like companion. Typically, in such binary systems, material from the companion star forms a disk around the white dwarf, which then feeds the star and can produce outflows. However, in this case, no disk was detected, yet a bow shock—a type of shock wave created when a star moves through interstellar gas—was observed. The bow shock, visible in red, green, and blue representing hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, has persisted for at least 1,000 years, challenging current understanding of how dead stars interact with their surroundings. The discovery was made using the MUSE instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), which allowed researchers to map the shock wave in detail and confirm its origin from the binary system. The white dwarf possesses a strong magnetic field, which may guide material from the companion star directly onto the white dwarf, bypassing the formation of a disk. However, the magnetic field alone cannot explain the longevity of the shock wave, which has existed for over a millennium. Researchers refer to this phenomenon as a 'mystery engine' that remains unexplained. The findings, published in Nature Astronomy, suggest that even without a disk, binary systems can drive powerful outflows, indicating a mechanism not yet understood. Future observations with ESO's upcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) may help uncover the hidden energy source responsible for this unexpected behavior. This discovery challenges the standard picture of matter movement and interaction in extreme binary systems, opening new avenues for research in astrophysics.

In 1985, I was an archaeology postgrad, compiling 150-odd years of excavation reports on Neolithic and Bronze Age burials and building a database on the university mainframe. I was becoming dispirited: I knew nothing about computers, and my supervisor and I were completely incompatible

White Dwarf was bimonthly in the early 1980s, and through letters and readers’ polls, demand was building for it to go monthly. The usual response was that the main problem was a lack of material. I had been homebrewing AD&D material for a while, so I typed up a couple of articles, sent them off,