A real life 'Death Star' is destroying planets in its own solar system
- 8 years ago
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — A dying star is ripping apart planets in its own solar system, according to a team of astronomers who published a paper yesterday in the journal Nature.
The star, called WD 1145+017, is a white dwarf in the constellation Virgo. The finding was made by Andrew Vanderburg, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in March. The white dwarf was spotted by NASA's Kepler space telescope as part of the spacecraft's K2 mission, the Boston Globe reported.
Vanderburg saw a regular dip in brightness of the white dwarf every four-and-a-half hours. This suggested an object was orbiting the white dwarf at a distance of about 840,000 kilometres, about twice the distance between Earth and the Moon. After analysing data from the ground-based telescopes, Vanderburg concluded that the signal was caused by the disintegration process of the planet by the white dwarf's gravitational pull, ABC Australia reported.
"We've caught a star in the act of destroying a planet in its own system," Vanderburg told the Boston Globe. "It's like the smoking gun."
After a regular star uses up its nuclear fuel, it expands and turns into a red giant. Red giants are hot enough to convert helium into carbon. However, when its helium fuel has been exhausted, a red giant starts to contract and become more compact, eventually turning into a white dwarf, a leftover of the star's inner core.
A white dwarf is extremely dense, and its gravitational pull is so enormous that it can tear an orbiting planet apart. Astronomers believe that when a planet orbits closer than the habitable zone, it can be disintegrated by the gravitational pull of a white dwarf.
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The star, called WD 1145+017, is a white dwarf in the constellation Virgo. The finding was made by Andrew Vanderburg, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in March. The white dwarf was spotted by NASA's Kepler space telescope as part of the spacecraft's K2 mission, the Boston Globe reported.
Vanderburg saw a regular dip in brightness of the white dwarf every four-and-a-half hours. This suggested an object was orbiting the white dwarf at a distance of about 840,000 kilometres, about twice the distance between Earth and the Moon. After analysing data from the ground-based telescopes, Vanderburg concluded that the signal was caused by the disintegration process of the planet by the white dwarf's gravitational pull, ABC Australia reported.
"We've caught a star in the act of destroying a planet in its own system," Vanderburg told the Boston Globe. "It's like the smoking gun."
After a regular star uses up its nuclear fuel, it expands and turns into a red giant. Red giants are hot enough to convert helium into carbon. However, when its helium fuel has been exhausted, a red giant starts to contract and become more compact, eventually turning into a white dwarf, a leftover of the star's inner core.
A white dwarf is extremely dense, and its gravitational pull is so enormous that it can tear an orbiting planet apart. Astronomers believe that when a planet orbits closer than the habitable zone, it can be disintegrated by the gravitational pull of a white dwarf.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to TomoNews, where we animate the most entertaining news on the internets. Come here for an animated look at viral headlines, US news, celebrity gossip, salacious scandals, dumb criminals and much more! Subscribe now for daily news animations that will knock your socks off.
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Check out our Android app: http://bit.ly/1rddhCj
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