A dying white dwarf star that is similar to the sun was seen feeding on remnants of a destroyed planetary system by British astronomers on Thursday.
One of the planetoids had a similar chemical composition as the Earth. Working with images provided by the Kepler space telescope and ground observatories, Warwick University researchers identified rocky remnants orbiting star WD 1145+017 with orbital periods between 4.5 and 4.9 hours.
The white dwarf star is located in the constellation Virgo, about 571 light years from Earth, according to La Prensa.
"This is something no human has seen before," said lead author Andrew Vanderburg, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "We're watching a solar system get destroyed."
Vanderburg and his colleagues made the observations using the 1.2-meter and MINERVA telescopes at Whipple Observatory, the MMT, MEarth-South, and Keck. Combining all of their findings, they found signs suggesting to several other chunks of material. The main transit was particularly prominent, dimming the star by 40 percent. The transit signal also showed a comet-like pattern.
The total amount of material is estimated to be about the mass of Ceres, a Texas-sized object that is the largest main-belt asteroid in our solar system, according to Phys.org.
Scientists speculate that the occurrence is an illustrative translation of what could be the eventual fate of our own solar system. Further observations of the star could give us clues as to how and when the solar system was born. By performing spectroscopy of the dust clouds, researchers may be able to find out what the planets were made of before their star consumed them and they shrunk in size.
However, More observations will be needed to characterize their size further, though, as small objects are at the far end of Kepler's capabilities, according to Popular Mechanics.
