Hubble Space Telescope catches dead star in the act of cosmic cannibalism

Water and other volatiles may be common in the outer reaches of planetary systems after the Hubble Space Telescope spotted evidence of a white dwarf star consuming rocky and icy material.

Astronomers used archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes to analyze the properties of a white dwarf. The dead star is sucking debris from its system's inner and outer reaches by detecting elements on its surface.

Ted Johnson, the lead researcher and a recent graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement that they have never seen both of these types of objects at the same time. We want to gain a better understanding of planetary systems that are still intact by studying the white dwarfs.

25% of sunlike stars eat their own planets.

It is possible to see what planets were made of when they first formed around the star and to confirm ideas about the violent and chaotic end stages of similar systems by observing this Cosmic Death Dance.

The former sunlike star has stopped burning fuel through nuclear fusion. The discovery that the stellar corpse is capturing material from both the asteroid belt and the Kuiper Belt is significant because it suggests that there is a common feature in the outer reaches of planetary systems.

Benjamin Zuckerman is a professor in the UCLA Division of Astronomy and Astrophysics and co-author of the research. The first example of a rocky and volatile parent body being required for the abundance of elements we see on this white dwarf was found in a study of hundreds of white dwarfs.

Astronomers at UCLA, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Germany were part of the group. The results were presented at a news conference.

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