Scientists find star with ‘scar’ from destroying planets

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Scientists have discovered a star with a marked “scar” from destroying the planets that encompass it.

When stars like our personal Sun attain the top of their life, they will grow to be a white dwarf, consuming the planets and asteroids that encompass them. Now scientists have discovered for the primary time that the method can go away a long-lasting mark on the star itself, a novel “scar”.

It is as if the Sun had reached the top of its life and devoured our photo voltaic system, leaving a mark of the planets – together with our personal – that encompass us right this moment.

“It is well known that some white dwarfs — slowly cooling embers of stars like our Sun — are cannibalising pieces of their planetary systems. Now we have discovered that the star’s magnetic field plays a key role in this process, resulting in a scar on the white dwarf’s surface,” stated Stefano Bagnulo, an astronomer at Armagh Observatory and Planetarium in Northern Ireland, UK, and lead writer of the brand new research.

The star consists of a focus of metals which are printed on the floor of the star. That star is named WD 0816-310 – and whereas it was as soon as just like however bigger than our Sun, right this moment it’s roughly the scale of the Earth.

Those metals had been as soon as the beginnings of planets. They by no means reached the scale our personal Earth, researchers stated.

“We have demonstrated that these metals originate from a planetary fragment as large as or possibly larger than Vesta, which is about 500 kilometres across and the second-largest asteroid in the Solar System,” says Jay Farihi, a professor at University College London, UK, and co-author on the research.

The metals seem like situated in a single particular a part of the star’s floor, relatively than being unfold throughout it. And the patch seems to be on one of many planet’s magnetic poles – suggesting that the magnetic discipline pulled the fabric onto the star and left the scar behind.

“Surprisingly, the material was not evenly mixed over the surface of the star, as predicted by theory. Instead, this scar is a concentrated patch of planetary material, held in place by the same magnetic field that has guided the infalling fragments,” says co-author John Landstreet, a professor at Western University, Canada, who can be affiliated with the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium.

“Nothing like this has been seen before.”

The findings are described in a paper, ‘Discovery of magnetically guided metal accretion onto a polluted white dwarf’, showing in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.