Cosmic 'Death Star' is Vaporizing an Entire Planet

First Posted: Oct 22, 2015 06:42 AM EDT

For the first time ever, astronomers have caught a "death star" destroying a planet. They've discovered a large, rocky object disintegrating in its death spiral around a distant white dwarf star.

"This is something no human has seen before," said Andrew Vanderburg, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We're watching a solar system get destroyed."

The researchers first found the death star through the NASA's Kepler K2 mission, which monitor stars for a dip in brightness that occurs when an orbiting body crosses the star. In this case, the researchers found a regular dip every 4.5 hours, which places the object just 520,000 miles from the white dwarf. That's about twice the distance from the Earth to the moon.

After finding the star in the first place, the researchers then made additional observations using ground-based facilities. Combining their data, they found signs of several additional chunks of material all in orbit between 4.5 and 5 hours. The signal actually suggested that there was an extended cloud of dust surrounding the fragment.

White dwarfs often show signs of heavier elements like silicon and iron in its light spectrum. It's possibly that white dwarfs can become "polluted" by planets that they consume.

"We now have a 'smoking gun' linking white dwarf pollution to the destruction of rocky planets," said Vanderburg.

Questions still remain about the origin of rocky objects. The most likely scenario is that an existing planet's orbit became unstable and it was kicked inward.

Currently, the remaining objects around the white dwarf are being vaporized by its heat. It appears that as time goes on, these objects will simply become dusting on the top of a white dwarf star.

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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Tagsstar, Stars, White Dwarf