A white dwarf star is eating planets. Yup. Is it fate that the new Star Wars film is coming out or just ironic foreshadowing? Is Earth next on the menu? See what we’re talking about after the jump.
White Dwarf – A star approximately the size of the earth, that is dying.
Somewhere in the galaxy about 570 light years away from our precious Earth on the constellation Virgo, there is a white dwarf star that is eating other planets around it. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics revealed that researchers witnessed “a large, rocky object disintegrating in its death spiral around a distant white dwarf star.”
Andrew Vanderburg of the astrophysics center stated,
“This is something no human has seen before,” “We’re watching a solar system get destroyed.”
“What we’re seeing are fragments of a disintegrating planet that is being vaporized by (the white dwarf’s) starlight and is losing mass,”
“The vapor is getting lost into orbit, and that condenses into dust which then blocks the starlight.”
Researchers reported that the white dwarf is the size of the biggest asteroid in our solar system, called Ceres, and it will be destroyed in about a million years. Researchers said this is the likely future of Earth’s solar system and existence. The sun is expected to grow so large that it will engulf Venus, Mercury and Earth. But don’t worry… that’s not for another 5 billion years.
