His findings were published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.
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“For the last decade we’ve suspected that white dwarf stars were feeding on the remains of rocky objects, and this result may be the smoking gun we’re looking for”, said K2 staff scientist Fergal Mullally from SETI and NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. For their work, the researchers used data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, Mashable reported.
The evidence for this unique system came from NASA’s Kepler K2 mission, which monitors stars for a dip in brightness that occurs when an orbiting body crosses the star.
Lead scientist Andrew Vanderburg, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in the United States, said: “This is something no human has seen before”.
The destruction of a solar system has been captured for the first time by astronomers who said the violent events provide a grim glimpse of Earth’s ultimate fate. As they are sucked closer and closer, they’re increasingly vaporized by the white dwarf’s intense heat.
Do you know what happens to the planets revolving around a star it dies?
Depending on scientific observations, the pull of gravity was going to set the orbits of the remaining planets off where a collision would throw the bodies at the white dwarf.
But this white dwarf is slightly different.
Francesca Faedi, an astronomer at the University of Warwick in England, believes seeing the final stages of a planetary system around a white dwarf to be vital in understanding exoplanets. But surprisingly, astronomers say they often see signs of these heavier elements in the white dwarf’s light spectrum.
The death star is about the size of dwarf planet Ceres, and scientists surmise it could fully consume itself within a million years from today. “One of the white dwarfs suddenly popped up with this really intriguing signature”, Vanderburg says. The data also showed a sloping pattern from the main transit, which caused a dimming of the white dwarf by as much as 40 percent. Generally, no heavy metals are present at detectable levels, as they are expected to sink to the center, but a few have been found to be “polluted” with metals like silicon and iron.
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However, More observations will be needed to characterize their size further, though, as small objects are at the far end of Kepler’s capabilities, according to Popular Mechanics. However, once the star began expanding, the orbit of the planet became erratic as it got sucked in by the dying white dwarf’s gravitational pull.
