Once a star evolves beyond the main sequence – the longest stage of stellar evolution, during which the radiation generated by nuclear fusion in a star’s core is balanced by gravitation – the fate of any planetary system it may have had is an enigma. Astronomers generally don’t know what happens to
A Process of Elimination, and a Disruptive Origin
Collisions between planetesimals – small, solid objects formed out of cosmic dust left over from the creation of a planetary system around a star – can produce this type of excess emission, but SOFIA and ALMA failed to see the large dust grains required for such objects to exist, ruling out one option.
“In piecing together the size and shape of the excess emission, and what those properties infer regarding the dust grains in the white dwarf environment, we conclude that a disrupted planetary system is the best solution to the question of how the Helix Nebula’s infrared excess was created and maintained,” said Jonathan Marshall, the lead author on the paper and a researcher at Academia Sinica in Taiwan.
“This gap lay around where we expected the dust emission to peak,” Marshall said. “Pinning down the shape of the dust emission is vital to constraining the properties of the dust grains that produce that emission, so the SOFIA observation helped refine our understanding.”
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