Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Each planet in the Solar System has its own star (sun). But has it ever occurred to us what if the star dies? What happened to the planets?
Launching from SiencealertMonday (27/8/2022), if the star is a certain white dwarf that is 86 light years away, the orbiting planets are certainly torn apart and eaten by it.
One of them is a special star named G238-44. Astronomers call him a glutton.
For the first time, astronomers have seen one of these stars engulf matter inside and outside a planetary system at the same time, even in the most distant reaches.
The display of filial cannibalism of this star is still being observed today.
In the atmosphere of G238-44, astronomers have detected traces of elements that suggest that the dead star recently accumulated metallic and rocky material. Such as asteroids in the inner Solar System, as well as icy cold material that can be found in the atmosphere of the outer Kuiper belt of the Solar System.
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Photo: Illustration of the planet Proxima d, a planet known to orbit the closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri (L. Calada – ESO)- – |
“We’ve never seen these two types of objects grow into white dwarfs at the same time,” said physicist and astronomer Ted Johnson of the University of California Los Angeles.
“By studying these white dwarfs, we hope to gain a better understanding of the intact planetary system.” he added.
White dwarfs are the final stages of evolution of small and medium mass stars that are eight times the mass of the Sun. Once such a star runs out of material to fuse, it expands to a gigantic size before eventually ‘exploding’ and the stellar core collapses under gravity to form a solid object, shining brightly with residual heat.
Although this process is difficult on the planets orbiting the star, recently, astronomers have found evidence to suggest that some parts of the planetary system orbiting the star can survive.
Because white dwarfs are very dense, heavy elements will dissipate quickly, which means any heavy elemental pollution in the white dwarf’s atmosphere must have been deposited recently.
The pollution in the white dwarf’s atmosphere is not what it seems, according to the findings of Johnson and his colleagues. Ten elements heavier than helium detected carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, calcium, and iron.
The abundance of iron and nitrogen was very high, the team said, indicating an object with a distinct iron core, while the latter indicated the presence of an icy body.
“The best fit for our data is a nearly two-to-one mixture of a Mercury-like material and a comet-like material, which is composed of ice and dust,” Johnson said.
“Metal iron and nitrogen ice each exhibit very different planet-forming conditions. No known solar system object has so much of either.”
The results also suggest that the materials to make habitable worlds may not be so scarce in the Milky Way galaxy.
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Astronomers Find Evidence of a New, Habitable Planet?
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