Science & Technology (Commonwealth Union) – The world of astronomy continues to evolve with decades of research. The questions astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts’ haves asked in relation to is their life outside planet earth, will aliens enslave humans and do aliens actually exist have been at the centre with recent advances in scientific data.
Astronomers have found something never seen before around a dead star: two rings of rocky debris encircling it, with a clear gap in between. The discovery provides a rare glimpse of what could someday happen to our own Solar System.
A star that has exhausted its fuel
The star is named J1328−1450. It’s a white dwarf, the small dense burnt-out core, that’s left when a star like our sun reaches the end of its life.
Stars like the Sun don’t just go out. When they use up their fuel they puff up, pushing their outer layers out into space. Planets near the star can be swallowed up or destroyed. Some of the rocky bodies survive, but can be torn apart, with the remnants then drifting out into a flat, spinning ring around the dead star.
We have seen rings like this around other white dwarfs. In those cases there was only one ring. J1328-1450 is another story. It’s got two of them.
Two rings with some space between them
The team used the Very Large Telescope (VLT), one of the driest places on Earth, found in Chile’s Atacama Desert and operated by the European Southern Observatory. They used an instrument called X-Shooter, which splits starlight into its constituent colours.
Astronomers study that light to read the signature of material around a star. One ring gives a simple pattern with two peaks. This star produced a pattern of four points, which resulted in two separate rings with a gap of empty space between them.
The rings are made of hot gas, vaporised rock. They are very stable, staying apart and not spreading out and merging, say the researchers.
Two little survivors
What makes the gap stay open? The researchers speculate there are two small planet-like bodies that orbit the star in different paths and their gravity makes the rings what they are. They both appeared to have survived the violent death of the star.
Probably the inner one is tiny, only a few kilometres across, about the size of a typical asteroid. The one on the outside edge is a lot bigger. Maybe the size of Pluto, or maybe the Moon.
The lead author, Nicola Gentile Fusillo, from the University of Trieste in Italy, says “We have known for some time that planets may survive beyond the transformation of their central star, but this is the first example of a complex system with a double debris disc and potentially two surviving planetesimals,”
The finding is important because our sun probably will follow the same path. In the far future it will swell up, shed its outer layers and shrink down to a white dwarf – a process that could destroy the Earth.
Researchers of the study indicated that it is not a reason to be concerned about. The transformations of the sun are billions of years apart. When it comes to astronomers, a dead star like J1328−1450 functions like a natural laboratory. With the evaluation of its remains, they can get to know the way planetary systems fall apart and the occurrences of the rocks that remain behind.
The findings were published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy. The research team includes scientists from Italy, the United Kingdom, Chile and Germany.
