Faraway object being destroyed by real-life ‘Death Star’

“We’ve caught a star in the act of destroying a planet in its own system”, he said.

Vanderburg and his colleagues made additional observations using a number of ground-based facilities: the 1.2-metre and MINERVA telescopes at Whipple Observatory, the MMT, MEarth-South, and Keck.

It was the first such object to be seen “transiting” a white dwarf, they reported in the journal Nature.

This observation was termed “seeing a solar system destroyed” as no one had seen it previously. The vapor is getting lost into orbit, which condenses into dust and blocks the starlight.

Kepler’s planet survey indicates that Earth-like planets in a star’s habitable zone are very common in our galaxy.

Discussing WD 1145 in Slate’s “Bad Astronomy” blog, Astronomer Phil Plait described the violent creation of a white dwarf star, in which a star is stripped of its outer layers, “exposing the star’s über-dense but intensely hot core to space”. Astronomers suspect that something is constantly replenishing those surface elements.

Their latest discovery corroborates the long-held belief that the source of pollution could be an asteroid or a small planet being torn apart by the dwarf’s intense gravity.

This kind of research, digging into the heavy elements in the atmospheres of polluted white dwarfs, might even help astronomers start parsing out the compositions of planets that may once have orbited these kinds of white dwarfs in other regions. After a few analysis, the team concluded that they were observing an orbiting object trailing a ring of dusty debris, likely being stripped from it by the white dwarf.

He said that the white dwarf was ripping it apart using its gravity & turning it to dust. That tail, rather than just an isolated object orbiting, would make the starlight change unevenly over time. “It’s excellent confirmation of the established theory of white dwarf pollution, and it opens up exciting new ways to study these objects”.

In the study which was published today, scientists noticed a constant dip in brightness every 4.5 to 5 hours.

The destruction of a solar system has been captured for the first time by astronomers who said the violent events provide a grim glimpse of Earth’s ultimate fate. Observation of this phenomenon is a major milestone for understanding stars and their orbiting planets. For their work, the researchers used data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, Mashable reported.

“So if you see heavy elements like these on a white dwarf, then something has dumped these heavy elements there”.

Seeing the final stages of a planetary system around such a dwarf is key, she added.

“We can not have a nice picture of exoplanets, we can not understand exoplanets, unless we understand how they got formed, how they evolve dynamically and how they die”, she tells Space.com.