Dead Stars Tell Story of Planet Birth
After the dead of stars the planet is born,Observations made with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope reveal six dead "white dwarf" stars littered with the remains of shredded asteroids. This might sound pretty bleak, but it turns out the chewed-up asteroids are teaching astronomers about the building materials of planets around other stars.
So far, the results suggest that the same materials that make up Earth and our solar system’s other rocky bodies could be common in the universe. If the materials are common, then rocky planets could be, too.
"If you ground up our asteroids and rocky planets, you would get the same type of dust we are seeing in these star systems," said Michael Jura of the University of California, Los Angeles, who presented the results today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, Calif. "This tells us that the stars have asteroids like ours — and therefore could also have rocky planets." Jura is the lead author of a paper on the findings accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.
Asteroids and planets form out of dusty material that swirls around young stars. The dust sticks together, forming clumps and eventually full-grown planets. Asteroids are the leftover debris. When a star like our sun nears the end of its life, it puffs up into a red giant that consumes its innermost planets, while jostling the orbits of remaining asteroids and outer planets. As the star continues to die, it blows off its outer layers and shrinks down into a skeleton of its former self — a white dwarf.
Sometimes, a jostled asteroid wanders too close to a white dwarf and meets its demise — the gravity of the white dwarf shreds the asteroid to pieces. A similar thing happened to Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 when Jupiter’s gravity tore it up, before the comet ultimately smashed into the planet in 1994.