Scientists have captured the glowing debris ring of an asteroid torn apart by a dead star for the first time ever..
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In the meantime, the telescope caught another interesting thing – a glowing halo around the star, which emerged after the fatal encounter with the asteroid.
Christopher Manser of the University of Warwick’s Astrophysics Group is the lead author of the study and his team examined the remains of planetary systems that surround white dwarf stars. Manser says that the diameter of the ring gap inside the debris ring is estimated to be 700,000 kilometers, which is half the size of the sun where that space can fit Saturn along with its rings inside.
The size of the system now observed is significantly greater than the Saturn’s ring though the debris and the white dwarf resembles the Saturn’s ring. “At the same time, the white dwarf is seven times smaller than Saturn but weighs 2,500 times more”.
While debris rings have been found at a handful of other white dwarfs, the imaging of SDSS 1228+1040 gives an unprecedented insight into the structure of these systems.
The gravity of this dead star has ripped the asteroid apart and there are particles of debris and dust which were produced by this collision that have formed an illuminating dark red ring. The debris disc is shown to scale compared to Saturn and its rings (right).
Christopher Manser, from the University of Warwick, United Kingdom stated that the team has for always been aware of the debris disks surrounding the white dwarfs. These two processes obtain scans from a lot of various angles combined later in a computer and then converted to a picture.
The images were taken over a period of twelve years from 2003 to 2015 as the debris disk kept rotating slowly by itself.
The image, showed a sort of spiral structure which researchers think is related to the collisions of dust grains, has revealed formations which can’t be detected in single snapshots confirming that they certainly are disc like.. White dwarf stars form when medium-sized stars reach the end of their lives, shrink down, and become very dense.
The scientists argue that systems such as SDSS1228+1040 are a glimpse at our own solar system’s future once our Sun starts to die.
University Herald reports that the study was “part of a research analyzing white dwarf stars left behind by dead planetary systems” and was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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There have been more than 30 debris disks discovered so far and most are stable. He added though that they couldn’t have imagined the exquisite details which are now being seen in the images which have been constructed using data collected over 12 years.
