🔭 This unique scar on a star shows it swallowed planetary matter

2024-02-28 12:00:16

At the end of their life, when stars like the Sun bow out, they do not disappear without a trace. They can engulf the planets and asteroids that have accompanied them throughout their existence.

This artist’s impression shows the woman blanche (A white dwarf is a gaseous celestial object resulting from the evolution of a star…) magnetic WD 0816-310, where astronomers discovered a scar (A scar is the visible part of an injury to the dermis after the tissue has…) printed on its surface (A surface generally refers to the surface layer of an object. The term a…) resulting (In mathematics, the resultant is a notion that applies to two polynomials….) from the ingestion of planetary debris.
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

An international team of astronomers, using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of theEuropean Southern Observatory (The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a…) (ESO) located in Chile, has just revealed for the first time a unique scar on the surface of a white dwarf, testimony to this cosmic process.

The white dwarf WD 0816-310, an Earth-sized remnant of a star similar to ours Soleil (The Sun (Sol in Latin, Helios or Ήλιος in Greek) is the star…)although slightly more massive (The word massive can be used like:), displays a concentration of metals on its surface. This “scar” is the direct result of the ingestion of planetary debris, potentially including a fragment the size of Vesta, the second largest asteroid (An asteroid is a celestial object whose dimensions vary by a few dozen…) of our solar system (The solar system is a planetary system composed of a star, the…). This discovery, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letterssheds new light on the crucial role of magnetic field (In physics, the magnetic field (or magnetic induction, or flux density…) of the star in this process.

The researchers observed that the detection of metals on WD 0816-310 varied with the star’s rotation, indicating that these metals were concentrated in a specific area rather than evenly distributed across its surface. This concentration of metals is synchronized with variations in the white dwarf’s magnetic field, suggesting that the metal scar lies on one of its magnetic poles. This process, by which the magnetic field channels metals toward the star, creates a distinct scar. This phenomenon is reminiscent of the mechanisms at work in the formation of auroras on Earth and Jupiter, where the magnetic field guides the ionized material towards the poles.

This study also illustrates how planetary systems can remain dynamically active, even after the “death” phase of their central star. THE observations (Observation is the action of attentively following phenomena, without wanting to…) made with the VLT and the FORS2 instrument, as well as the data (In information technology (IT), data is an elementary description, often…) archived from the X-shooter instrument, were crucial in linking the metallic scar to the white dwarf’s magnetic field.

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