A star was recently spotted by the NASA Kepler space telescope, destroying a planet slowly. “Star Wars” fans may compare the occurrence to the fictional spacecraft Death Star disintegrating an entire planet.
CBS News reported that the star slightly bigger than Earth was nearing the end of its life and destroyed the planet, which is about the size of the dwarf planet Ceres. The star slowly disintegrated the celestial body and scientists estimated that the job will be done in approximately one million years.
Scientists monitored the crumbling planet via the NASA telescope to reveal more details about the incident. It is the first time scientists have monitored a planetary entity orbiting a small faint white dwarf, its destroyer.
“What we’re seeing are fragments of a disintegrating planet that is being vaporized by [the white dwarf’s] starlight and its losing mass,” Andrew Vanderburg, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the new study, stated. He said that they are watching a solar system getting destroyed. The vapor is getting lost into orbit, which condenses into dust and blocks the starlight.
Based on the same CBS News report, when a star ages, it tends to balloon outward and slowly transforms into a big red giant that swallows any entity that orbits near it. In our own solar system, the sun may eventually grow to swallow Mercury, Venus and Earth in about 5 billion years. Over time, the old star will tire itself out and shed its outer envelope into space. The core will contract into a small white dwarf, which is the final form of stars, with almost the same size as our sun. There are also bigger stars that die in supernova explosions.
Other researchers were equally interested in the new discovery, with each one having their own theories for the occurrence. Francesca Faedi, an astronomer at the University of Warwick in England, said that they have never witnessed a happening such as this. It is the first object known to have bene born, survived and currently dying while orbiting a host star. The recent spotting will provide a better understanding on exoplanets, according to Faedi.
Even though the last days of Earth is still far into the future, the new study provided a glimpse of what will most likely happen to our planet, said Faedi in an Express report.
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