Look, ye mighty, and despair.
"We're finding the oldest stellar remnants in the Milky Way that are polluted by once Earth-like planets.""We're finding the oldest stellar remnants in the Milky Way that are polluted by once Earth-like planets."Astronomers have spotted something gruesome in our cosmic backyard: a star system that used to have terrestrial planets like our own, except that all that remains now are the ancient, obliterated vestiges of those bygone worlds.
. "It's amazing to think that this happened on the scale of ten billion years, and that those planets died way before the Earth was even formed."By using spectroscopic and photometric data from Gaia, the Dark Energy Survey, and the European Southern Observatory's X-shooter instrument on the Very Large Telescope, the astronomers determined that WDJ2147-4035 is around 10.7 billion years old — and it's spent 10.2 billion years of that lifespan cooling off.
Another white dwarf, WDJ1922+0233, was also the subject of analysis in the study. And intriguingly, Elms and her team found that the star is polluted by materials with a similar composition to the Earth's continental crust.
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