Proving that space is totally metal, astronomers have a new hypothesis of why they saw a white dwarf star gaining mass. It's not fusing heavier elements, it's just eating its planets.

In the cosmic version of "Saturn Devouring His Son," the star WD 1145+017 seemed to exhibit a few strange behaviors. The star is a white dwarf, a sort of husk after lower-mass stars have gone red giant and exhausted their fuel, burning husks of hydrogen only able to fuse into helium.

But WD 1145+017 was a little ... different. Heavier elements, including calcium, iron, and aluminum were spotted in the spectroscopy of the star, suggesting those elements were at the surface, which is something that shouldn't be. In addition, the K2 mission spotted up to six dwarf planets in orbit around the star, each of them seeming to have a trailing dust of debris. The study was published today in Nature.

It seems that, under this model, the star is breaking its dwarf planets apart and feasting on the debris of its solar system, swallowing up to 8 million kilograms of mater per second. Some may not be dwarf planets so much as "chunks," and the Kepler astronomers will study the objects further to do a sort of triage on the system and figure out where the objects came from – and what it could mean for our future.

That's because white dwarfs – dense and roughly Earth sized – are what become of stars like the sun without enough mass to become dense neutron stars or even denser black holes. The husks can burn a long, long time, taking billions of years to cool down to the point where they become a black dwarf (a theoretical star that, unlike the brown dwarf, is not a failed star so much as a has-been.)

The star could thus be illustrative of the eventual fate of our own solar system, after the sun enters a red giant phase and more or less has consumed Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth already. Further observations of the star, located about 571 light years away, could also give clues to a much, much earlier time when the solar system first formed. By performing spectroscopy of the dust clouds, researchers may be able to find out what the planets were made of before their star went all Galactus on them and reduced them in size

Interestingly enough, the study also refers to the object or objects as minor planets, meaning these may be some of the smallest objects ever identified by Kepler. More observations will be needed to characterize their size further, though, as small objects are at the far end of Kepler's capabilities.

Source: Nature

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