Hubble finds dead stars “polluted” with planetary debris
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them. This discovery suggests that rocky planet assembly is common in clusters, say researchers.
The stars, known as white dwarfs — small, dim remnants of stars once like the Sun — reside 150 light-years away in the Hyades star cluster, in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull). The cluster is relatively young, at only 625 million years old.
Astronomers believe that all stars formed in clusters. However, searches for planets in these clusters have not been fruitful — of the roughly 800 exoplanets known, only four are known to orbit stars in clusters. This scarcity may be due to the nature of the cluster stars, which are young and active, producing stellar flares and other outbursts that make it difficult to study them in detail.
Hubble’s spectroscopic observations identified silicon in the atmospheres of two white dwarfs, a major ingredient of the rocky material that forms Earth and other terrestrial planets in the Solar System. This silicon may have come from asteroids that were shredded by the white dwarfs’ gravity when they veered too close to the stars. The rocky debris likely formed a ring around the dead stars, which then funnelled the material inwards.
The debris detected whirling around the white dwarfs suggests that terrestrial planets formed when these stars were born. After the stars collapsed to form white dwarfs, surviving gas giant planets may have gravitationally nudged members of any leftover asteroid belts into star-grazing orbits.
Besides finding silicon in the Hyades stars’ atmospheres, Hubble also detected low levels of carbon. This is another sign of the rocky nature of the debris, as astronomers know that carbon levels should be very low in rocky, Earth-like material.
This new study suggests that asteroids less than 160 kilometres across were gravitationally torn apart by the white dwarfs’ strong tidal forces, before eventually falling onto the dead stars.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, and G. Bacon (STScI)
venezuelan poodle moth
my heart hurts omg let me love you cute moth
Kinda scary tho.
OK. For reals. I think its decided, moths aren’t bugs. They are small adorable little fluffy animals. They just are.
10/10 good moth
this is quite obviously a needle-felted toy and not a real moth ya bunch of rubes! Here is an actual Venezuelan Poodle Moth;
Mothman
(Source: boysoprano)
American pacifist James Zwerg of the Freedom Riders immediately after being beaten by an angry mob upon arrival in Montgomery, Alabama in 1960. Zwerg was the first off the bus upon its arrival in the terminal and faced the blunt of the crowd’s violence. He would have died that day had it not been for an anonymous black male stepping in and saving his life by deflecting the mob’s attention onto himself.
(Source: tiniestlioness)
