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Proving that space is totally metal, astronomers have a new hypothesis of why they saw a white dwarf star gaining mass. It’s not fusing heavier elements, it’s just eating its planets.
Like gazing into a cosmic crystal ball, researchers discovered a large rocky object – similar in size to dawrf planet Ceres in our solar system – disintegrating as it spirals towards its distant white dwarf star and is ripped apart by gravity.
Lead scientist Andrew Vanderburg, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in the US, said: “This is something no human has seen before. We’re watching a solar system get destroyed.”
White dwarfs are the hot remnants of sun-like stars at the end of their lives that have swollen up and discarded their outer layers.
The one monitored by the team was about 570 light years from Earth in the constellation Virgo.
Using the American space agency Nasa’s Kepler space telescope, scientists spotted the doomed planetary object from the dip in brightness caused when an orbiting body crosses in front of a star.
It was the first such object to be seen “transiting” a white dwarf, they reported in the journal Nature.
At 600 miles across, Ceres is the largest body in the asteroid belt of our solar system.
The scientists analysis indicated the presence of a debris disc around the white dwarf and “pollution” by heavy metals inside it which were the remains of the planets that used to orbit it now inside the shrunken star.
“We now have a ‘smoking gun’ linking white dwarf pollution to the destruction of rocky planets,” said PhD student Mr Vanderburg.
The Ceres-sized body had survived an earlier red dwarf stage as the star died, and appeared to be the last planetary body to be eaten up by the star.
Agencies/Canadajournal
