Artist’s impression of the destruction a dwarf planet by the star WD1145 + 017. – NASA / M.GARLICK

PB

    • Published
    • Set Updated
  • Keywords

Here, no destructive laser beam but simply irresistible force for the last act of a cosmic opera. Spoiler alert: it ends worse than Shakespeare. A more than 500 light years from Earth, NASA observed a “death star” in the process of cannibalizing a dwarf planet. “A human has ever seen it. We are witnessing the destruction of a solar system, “says Harvard astronomer Andrew Vanderburg

Located in the constellation Virgo, the star WD1145 + 017 is a white dwarf end of life. After consuming the majority of its fuel during an expansion phase, it collapsed on itself, to a size comparable to that of Earth but with a density a million times greater than the Sun, one tonne per cubic centimeter. The observation was made by the Kepler telescope.

The star is in the vicinity of a dwarf planet the size of Ceres of about 1000 km in diameter. Just over 800 thousand kilometers separate the two objects, twice the Earth-Moon distance. Each time, every half past four, the cannibal star pulls a small piece of planet sucks, causing a trail of debris that resembles that of a comet.

This will get worse. Soon, the gravitational pull of the tide force will break up the rocky body. By a million years, there will be a small cloud of gas, and metal incorporated into the white dwarf.

The fate of the Earth should be different. Scientists are still debating it but many feel that our planet will be swallowed during the expansion phase of the Sun into a red giant in about 7 billion years. But the conditions are unbearable before, probably within one to two billion years, when the Sun will double to cut by 500 million years and slowly transform our planet into desert. If we have not done before.