Astronomers discover a planet being sprayed from its star – Maxisciences

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A team of American astronomers think I have seen the tragic fate of a rocky planet orbiting a white dwarf. The small planetary body is being disintegrated by the powerful gravitational force of its star.

Life on this small planet to be, say, eventful! Indeed, scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics just highlight its delicate situation: it is currently disintegrated by the star around which it revolves

This star bears the name WD. 1145 + 017, and could be studied by Andrew Vanderburg thanks to NASA’s Kepler telescope. And it’s not a very particular celestial body: a white dwarf, the residue of a star at end of life, with a size similar to that of Earth, but with a mass comparable to that of the sun.

The small planetary body that revolves around it is to thank you for the huge temperature it gives off, and its destructive gravitational force.

A planet become “comet”

On the basis of this discovery, there is a strange observation. Generally, an exoplanet passing between its star and we can be detected by the sudden decrease in brightness emitted by the star, followed by its swift return to a normal level. But for WD 1145 + 017, the received light amount drop every 4 hours and a half, but increases again very slowly.

Also, Andrew Vanderburg inferred that an item of size a large asteroid was to turn around the star, very close to her, and be followed by a tail of debris, comparable to that of a comet. It is this proximity to the white dwarf and its powerful gravitational force that causes the gradual disintegration of the small planet.

Harvard-Smithsonian astronomers astrophysics center indicated in their statement that This is the first discovered planetary body orbiting a white dwarf. Although the existence of such objects is suspected for years.

The last meal of the star

Indeed, scientists had already noticed that the atmosphere of some white dwarfs was not as pure as what they expected. Instead only contain hydrogen and helium, sometimes it is “polluted” with calcium, silica or iron.

For several years, we think that these foreign elements come from planetary bodies digested by the star. According to Andrew Vanderburg, the work of his team so come precisely to validate this theory: “ We now have good evidence linking pollution of white dwarfs in the destruction of rocky planets ”

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