![]() “It’s amazing to think that this happened on the scale of 10 billion years, and that those planets died way before Earth was even formed.”Īlthough this isn’t the first white dwarf found to be accreting rubble from former planets nearby, it is the oldest one, and, as such, it can teach us a lot about the chemical composition of planets that formed 11 billion years ago, some of the earliest in our galaxy and the universe at large.ĪLSO READ: Our brains get a boost when studying new languages, to help us along ![]() ![]() “The red star WDJ2147-4035 is a mystery as the accreted planetary debris are very lithium- and potassium-rich and unlike anything known in our own solar system,” said Abigail Elms, a PhD student at the University of Warwick in the U.K. According to a new paper, the white dwarf is one of two bodies of its kind discovered by the European Space Agency’s Gaia galaxy-mapping mission that are heavily polluted by planetary debris. While all that is very sad for WDJ2147-4035, researchers are less interested in the star itself, and more in what used to orbit around it. Since then, however, it has expended all its hydrogen fuel and extinguished into a cool white dwarf. WDJ2147-4035 began its life as a regular star some 10.7 billion years ago, a short 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
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