Writing in the journal, Nature, Vanderburg describes the results as the first evidence for rocky, disintegrating bodies around a white dwarf. Vanderburg then explained that fragments of this disintegrating planet got vaporized because of the white dwarf & was losing mass. This vapor got lost in orbit & then condensed into dust & blocked the starlight. The phenomena were spotted through NASA’s Kepler K2 mission, the space observatory that takes note when the stars dim when an orbiting body crosses them, The Space Reporter says.
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Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is the lead author of the paper. As stars like our sun age, they puff into red giants and gradually lose about half their mass, shrinking down to 1/100th of their original size, equating to about the size of Earth.
The gravity of the black hole causes intense tidal forces to tug at the star and rip it apart.
The scientists said that the planet is about 520,000 miles away from the white dwarf, which is twice the distance between the Earth and the moon, ABC News reported. Even if Earth does escape death then, it looks as though it probably won’t survive the sun’s white dwarf phase and will likely suffer the same fate as the little planet in the Virgo constellation.
The data also confirms the hypothesis that heavy metal pollution previously observed in white dwarf stars was due to the cannibalization of planets. A planet is being torn apart by a star.
The ability of the scientists to see dust from the crumbling body change the light emanating from the white dwarf gives astronomers a complete sense of how stars and planets orbit themselves. Any metals would be too heavy, and would sink to the center of the White Dwarf, where we can’t detect them.
“This is something no human has seen before”.
In our own solar system, the sun is expected to run out of fuel in 5 to 7 billion years, and will become a white dwarf that could engulf the Earth as it expands, he said.
“The star is now destroying and disintegrating an orbiting planet bit by bit”, reports Space.com.
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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. Usually this sentence wouldn’t generate a ton of excitement, but scientists believe that this vicious space-war validates a long-held theory that white dwarfs are capable of “cannibalizing” possible remnant planets.
