The find provides further evidence that rocky planets were able to form in abundance in the distant past.
. It then puffed off its outer layers to expose its inert helium-rich core — a white dwarf.
With the gravitational fields in flux as the star evolved through its red giant phase, some of the orbiting planets were either destroyed or disrupted, while others may have. Either way, the disturbances resulted in large amounts of orbiting planetary debris that has since been falling onto the white dwarf.
Astronomers led by Abigail Elms, who is a PhD student at the University of Warwick in the U.K., used measurements of light spectra from Gaia, the Dark Energy Survey using theon the Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, and the X-Shooter instrument on the Very Large Telescope also in Chile, to analyze the chemical composition of the red-colored WDJ2147-4035, and the second white dwarf, WDJ1922+0233, which appears blue.
The results show a surprising diversity of planetary compositions. Blue WDJ1922+0233, which gets its color not from its temperature but by the unusual mixing of gases in its helium-hydrogen atmosphere, is apparently being polluted by material similar in composition to that of Earth's continental crust.
"These metal-polluted stars show that Earth isn't unique, [that] there are other planetary systems out there with planetary bodies similar to
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