Death Throes

We've all heard that you can't take it with you. Well, scientists have discovered a dying star that is trying very hard to take its entire planetary system with it.

G238-44, a white dwarf located some 86 light-years away, seems determined it is not going alone. It's already made one attempt to end its system. You see, a white dwarf is what results when a star that is up to 8 times the mass of our sun reaches the end of its life. Once that star runs out of material to fuse, it puffs up to red giant size before ejecting its outer material. Then the core collapses to form a dense object that shines bright with the light of residual heat.

This process can put the inner planets right in the middle of that red giant until the outer shell is ejected and the core collapses. Scientists have discovered some planets that appear to have survived being gobbled up by a red giant phase, but not many, and they certainly don't appear to have any atmosphere or water left on them. When our sun hits that stage in a few billion years, the red giant produced could reach as far as Mars.

But we were talking about G238-44, which has reached the white dwarf stage, so it is currently much more dense than it used to be. Scientists studying it have been examining G238-44's atmosphere, and have found a plethora of 'heavy' elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, calcium, and iron. Most of these would have come from rocky worlds and inner system asteroids that probably 'survived' the red giant phase. The denser star is pulling them in and eating them.

But the nitrogen—and there seemed to be a lot of it—probably came from frozen worlds and asteroids such as exist in our Kuiper Belt. Apparently, the shift in gravity has perturbed their orbits, and the star is pulling them in and eating them also.

I wonder what the system will look like when all the planets and asteroids have been eaten, and the star cools into a massive hunk of... what? A huge rocky planet? A frozen gas giant with a big rocky core? What do you think it will be?

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/a-dead-star-has-been-caught-ripping-apart-its-planetary-system/ar-AAYGGzI?ocid=mailsignout&li=BBnb7Kz