When a White Dwarf Devours the Earth

Astronomers have successfully captured images of the destruction of a solar system for the first time. These images can provide a glimpse into the future of planet Earth. The images, captured by the Kepler 2 telescope, show remnants of a world orbiting a dead star (or white dwarf) in the Virgo constellation, located 570 light-years away from Earth. A star, when it reaches an old age and is below a certain mass, becomes a white dwarf. Scientists say that pieces of the destroyed planet orbit the white dwarf every 4.5 to 5 hours at a distance of 520,000 miles, which is more than twice the distance between Earth and the Moon. According to The Guardian, Andrew Vanderburg, one of the scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, stated, "No human has ever seen anything like this before. We are witnessing the destruction of a solar system." Sun-like stars continue to live by nuclear reactions that convert hydrogen into helium. However, when hydrogen runs out, they burn heavier elements like helium, carbon, and oxygen, causing them to expand significantly. Over time, the star sheds its outer layers, leaving behind a core the size of Earth, known as a white dwarf. New planets passing in front of their parent star reduce its light. The Kepler 2 telescope can detect the presence of new planets by noticing the decrease in light. This time, scientists observed a white dwarf named WD1145+17. Kepler 2's findings showed that about 40% of the star's light decreases every 4.5 hours due to materials passing in front of it. Kepler's findings have been confirmed by measurements from other telescopes in Massachusetts, Chile, and Hawaii. The combined discoveries from these telescopes indicate that large rocky pieces are orbiting this dead star. Vanderburg, in a paper published in Nature, introduced the results of this research as the first evidence of rocky pieces around white dwarfs. This new discovery provides an answer to one of the great mysteries of astronomy: what is the source of heavy metal pollution in some white dwarfs? Vanderburg stated, "We now have solid evidence linking white dwarf pollution to the destruction of rocky planets." Astronomers do not know exactly where these asteroids came from, but one possibility is that the death of the star destabilized the orbit of a large planet nearby. Thus, the white dwarf pulled these asteroids toward itself. As they approached the star, the heat from the white dwarf caused the asteroids to vaporize, and gravity caused them to disintegrate. Such an end could await our solar system as well. When the sun dies in about 5 billion years, it will expand and swallow the inner planets like Mars, Venus, and possibly Earth. Even if Earth escapes this fate, it will still be shattered while orbiting the white dwarf that remains from the sun. NASA's website also confirms this discovery as evidence that white dwarfs can swallow the remnants of their solar system's planets. Vanderburg believes, "What we are seeing may be similar to the destruction of our own solar system in the future." According to Francesca Faedi, an astronomer at the University of Warwick, the death of the star that Vanderburg's team witnessed may have caused the planets of this distant solar system to collide and turn into large rocky pieces similar to meteors. In a paper published in Nature, she wrote, "It is truly exciting that the last moments of a solar system have been recorded. Although the death of planet Earth will happen in a very distant future, this research allows us to glimpse the potentially inevitable fate of our own planet."