White dwarfs gobble Earthlike treats
Rocky planetary crumbs found in the dead stars' atmospheres
By Nadia Drake
Astronomers studying the atmospheres of planet-munching white dwarf stars have found that some stellar meals included the same ingredients as Earth.
Remains of rocky bodies that once circled the white dwarfs pepper the gas envelopes around the dead stars. The ratios of elements in these remains — called “pollution,” since it mars the star’s normally pristine hydrogen or helium atmosphere — tell astronomers what the bodies were made of and where they might have come from. Although about as common as normal stars in the Milky Way, white dwarfs aren’t the most obvious choice for astronomers looking for traces of extrasolar planets — but, it turns out, the dense, collapsed stars may be incredibly useful.
Each of two polluted white dwarf stars snarfed at least 10 sextillion grams of rocky dust, roughly equal to the mass of the dwarf planet Ceres (a sextillion equals 1 with 21 zeros after it). And, one of the stars ate something very similar in composition to the Earth, astronomers report online August 7 at arXiv.org and in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
“This means that planetlike rocky material is forming at Earthlike distances or temperatures from these stars,” says astronomer and study coauthor Ben Zuckerman of UCLA. Zuckerman notes that it’s still unclear whether the material is from a planet, planetlike bodies or an asteroid, but it is clear that there’s a lot of it.