Is there another recipe for life? The chemistry can tell us
— Jay Farihi
The study offers insight into what will happen in our solar system when our Sun burns out 5 billion years from now. It is published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The dead stars - called white dwarfs - are the burned-out cores of Sun-like stars. The finding suggests that terrestrial planets formed around these white dwarfs when they were young stars.
Researchers found the white dwarfs’ atmospheres “polluted” with silicon - rocky material that makes up Earth and other terrestrial planets in our solar system.
This silicon pollution likely occurred when the dwarf’s gravity shredded asteroids that got sucked in to its pull, after asteroid belts were initially disrupted by the gravity of surviving Jupiter-sized planets - with debris settling into a ring around the dead stars similar to the rings of Saturn.
“When these stars were born, they built planets, and there’s a good chance they are retaining some of them,” said lead investigator Dr Jay Farihi of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy.
“The rocks we are seeing are evidence for the Lego building blocks of planets. Both of these stars show asteroids being thrown around, which tells us that rocky planet assembly is common.”
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Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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