Researchers using NASA’s Kepler space telescope, the K2 mission, have discovered “strong evidence” that a white dwarf star is tearing apart a rocky object in its orbit.
“We are for the first time witnessing a miniature “planet” ripped apart by intense gravity, being vaporized by starlight and raining rocky material onto its star,” said Andrew Vanderburg, graduate student from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the paper published in Nature.
A dense white dwarf star is created when a star, similar to our sun, balloons in size into a red giant as it ages then gradually sloughs off half of its mass to shrink to the size of Earth. The latest finding confirms a theory that these white dwarfs can cannibalize any surviving planets in their solar system.
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“We are for the first time witnessing a miniature “planet” ripped apart by intense gravity, being vaporized by starlight and raining rocky material onto its star,” said Andrew Vanderburg, graduate student from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the paper published in Nature.
A dense white dwarf star is created when a star, similar to our sun, balloons in size into a red giant as it ages then gradually sloughs off half of its mass to shrink to the size of Earth. The latest finding confirms a theory that these white dwarfs can cannibalize any surviving planets in their solar system.
Continue reading…
Continue reading...