NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered debris of Earth-like planets in the atmospheres of two dead stars.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered debris of Earth-like planets in the atmospheres of two dead stars that are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster named Hyades.

"We have identified chemical evidence for the building blocks of rocky planets," researcher Jay Farihi of the University of Cambridge said in a statement. "When these stars were born, they built planets, and there's a good chance that they currently retain some of them. The signs of rocky debris we are seeing are evidence of this - it is at least as rocky as the most primitive terrestrial bodies in our solar system."

Silicon was found in the atmospheres of these two white dwarfs. This is an important element in the rocky material with which the Earth was formed. These rocky materials are also known to have low levels of carbon which was also discovered in the atmospheres of the two dead stars.

"The one thing the white dwarf pollution technique gives us that we won't get with any other planet detection technique is the chemistry of solid planets," Farihi said. "Based on the silicon-to-carbon ratio in our study, for example, we can actually say that this material is basically Earth-like."

After analyzing the light from the two stars, scientists concluded that there are planetary systems around stars in star clusters. It also helped gain an understanding of the future of our solar system.

The research was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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