The Étoile ‘Morte’ has taken on an snack on a Pluto type object

Nature can become brutal. On a cosmic ladder, things become even more destructive – leaving behind the carnage with stellar dust the size of an entire planet.

Astronomers using the Hubble space telescope have identified a white dwarf – the rest of the nucleus of a dying star – joying a meal of certain researchers of fragments later identified as coming from a Pluto type object. According to an article on the discovery published on September 18 in the monthly opinions of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers apparently caught the dwarf near the end of his meal; Some time ago, the intense gravitational traction of the dwarf probably torn off an icy planet from its ordinary orbit.

In addition, a more in-depth analysis of the condemned object revealed that its chemical composition included key elements such as carbon, sulfur, nitrogen and oxygen, which, according to its disappearance, the tiny planet may have held water on its surface.

A “cosmic crime scene”

The atmosphere of a white dwarf generally consists of hydrogen and helium. But this particular dwarf, WD 1647 + 375, bore an unusual food for volatiles or chemicals with low melting points. It told researchers that something was turned off.

“White dwarfs act as scenes of cosmic crime,” said the main study of the study, Snehalata Sahu in a statement. “When a planet (small solid objects supposed to form planets) falls, its elements leave chemical fingerprints in the atmosphere of the star, allowing us to rebuild the identity of the” victim “.”

The team therefore launched a detective work. One thing that was stood out was the abundance of nitrogen in WD 1647 + 375, that the researchers explained was a “particularly important chemical imprint of the icy worlds”. Dwarf oxygen gain was also much higher than it would have been if the victim had been a rocky object.

“We know that the surface of Pluto is covered with nitrogen,” added Sahu in a declaration by Hubble. “We believe that the white dwarf has accrected fragments of the crust and the mantle of a dwarf planet.”

Based on the ultraviolet signals of Hubble, the team has been able to deduce that the star’s meal has been underway for at least the last 13 years, consuming the object at a rate of around 440,925 pounds (200,000 kilograms) per second. If this is the case, the victim at his peak would have had a minimum diameter of approximately 3 miles (5 kilometers).

All the evidence suggested that WD 1647 + 375 snacks an object which was once a frozen planet floating around the local version of the Kuiper belt, a glossy ring of debris around our solar system.

An overview of the past and the future

This discovery offers a surprising window on the past and the future of cosmic systems, explained the researchers.

For example, glazed comettes and planetsimals such as the giant WD 1647 + 375 snack “provide water and other volatiles to terrestrial planets in extraness systems – a prerequisite for the development of life in other worlds”, according to the document. Now that we know that icy planetsimals exist, this theory could be tested further with other objects, namely the recent visitor of the interstellar comet, 3i / Atlas.

But WD 1647 + 375 himself offers an overview of what will come for our own solar system, added Sahu. Our sun will eventually expand and collapse in a white dwarf like WD 1647 + 375. When this happens, the planets of our solar system can meet a spell similar to this ice planet.

“If an extraterrestrial observer looks at our solar system in the distant future,” said Sahu, “they could see the same kind of remains that we see today around this white dwarf.”