Researchers believe a tiny star is being "pounded" by rogue asteroids.
One of these rocks seems to have had a mass of about a billion [tons]," Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation astronomer and member of the research team Doctor Ryan Shannon said in the news release.
The star, dubbed PSR J0738-4042, 37,000 light-years from Earth in the Puppis constellation. The region around the star is harsh and full of radiation.
"If a large rocky object can form here, planets could form around any star. That's exciting," Doctor Shannon said.
The star is a pulsar, meaning it emits radio waves; these waves flash over the Earth repetitively with "the regularity of a clock," the news release reported.
"That is exactly what we see in this case," Doctor Shannon said. "We think the pulsar's radio beam zaps the asteroid, [vaporizing] it. But the [vaporized] particles are electrically charged and they slightly alter the process that creates the pulsar's beam."
The team believes surrounding asteroids created the pulsar in the first place. The material blasted from the pulsar would for a disc of debris as they fall back in towards the object. Researchers have also found this type of space dust around a another pulsar called J0146+61.
"This sort of dust disk could provide the 'seeds' that grow into larger asteroids," Paul Brook, a PhD student co-supervised by the University of Oxford and CSIRO who led the study of PSR J0738-4042, said in the news release.
Two planet-sized objects were found around the pulsar PSR 1257+12 back in 1992 but are believed to have formed from a different mechanism.
"The new study has been published as a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a leading journal of astronomical research: Evidence of an asteroid encountering a pulsar ," the news release reported.
