I have vague memories of this great sci-fi novel I enjoyed in my younger days. It was based around life on a white star. On one side was this alien species that lived its day on the white star, and on the other side were humans, perhaps? Life on the white star was subject to a sort of time dilation, so every hour the humans talked to the creatures it was a year of their lives (or something akin to that). Eventually they made robots or other artificial creatures to talk to the humans so they wouldn’t have to sacrifice a year just for a conversation.
I don’t remember much else except I remember at the end of the book the author had pages and pages of mathematical proofs to show that life on a white dwarf star was at least conceivable. I just remember the central plot.
It certainly sounds like Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg to me. The humans didn’t live ON the white dwarf, because they’d have been crushed by the gravity. Even to apoproach required a special craft. The white dwarf-dwellers had a different time scale, because nucloear reactions are faster than chemical reactions.
Forward wrote a sequel, Starquake, but I didn’t think it was as good.
This was his first novel. I heard about it at a convention when Frederick Pohl, the GoH, mentioned it in his talk and recommended it. He’d been one of the reviewers.
Glad to help. This was a pretty easy well - a well-known novel that you remembered fairly unique details about. There are probably dozens of people on the SDMB who could have answered within moments of seeing your post - I was just lucky enough to see it first.
Forward also wrote a few other books, which you might enjoy. Even though CalMeacham doesn’t think that Starquake was as good, I still found it quite readable. Forward wrote *Rocheworld, *which had intelligent life living on a double planet that was so close that the planets shared a sea, and Camelot 3K, which had aliens that were intelligent in their own right, but also had a shared mind, and they didn’t die of old age.
Reading it on Wiki, it certainly sounds right.