From India Today Web DeskThe universe is more than 13.7 billion years old and has seen the birth, aging and death of several planetary systems. Astronomers on Earth first discovered the oldest remnant of the solar system in the Milky Way. The debris of the planetary system is found only 90 light years from Earth.
Astronomers have identified the oldest star in our galaxy that collects debris from a small planet orbiting the planet, making it one of the oldest rocky and icy planetary systems ever discovered in our galaxy. This planetary system orbits a faint white dwarf star and the remains of the solar system found are at least 10 billion years old.
A white dwarf is a star that has burned all of its fuel and lost its outer layer and is now undergoing a shrinking and cooling process. The fate of most stars, including those similar to our Sun, is to become white dwarfs and scientists have claimed that when a star loses the end of its life, any planet orbiting it will be disturbed and, in some cases, destroyed.
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Details of the findings were published in the Royal Astronomical Society Monthly Notices. The team of astronomers modeled two unusual white dwarfs discovered by the European Space Agency’s GAIA space observatory. Both stars are contaminated with planetary debris.
While one has been spotted in blue, the other is the faintest and redest ever found in the local galactic environment so far.
“When these early stars formed more than 10 billion years ago, the universe was less rich in metals than it is today because minerals formed in advanced stars and massive stellar explosions. The observed white dwarf provides an interesting window into the formation of planets in minerals. – Poor and gas-rich environment. On the conditions in which the solar system was formed, “said Professor Pierre-Emmanuel Tremblay of the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick in a declaration.
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The team used spectroscopic and photometric data from GAIA, the Dark Energy Survey and the European Southern Observatory’s X-Shooter instrument to analyze how long it took to cool. The star, named WDJ2147-4035, is about 10.7 billion years old, of which 10.2 billion years spent cooling down as a white dwarf.
The second “blue” star WDJ1922 + 0233 is slightly smaller than WDJ2147-4035 and is contaminated with planetary debris with a composition similar to the Earth’s continental crust.
“We have found the oldest stellar remains in the Milky Way that have ever been contaminated by an Earth-like planet. It is amazing to think that this happened on a scale of ten billion years and that these planets died before the formation of Earth.” , said lead author Abigail Elms, a doctoral student at the University of Warwick.
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