White dwarf eating planetary remnants provides glimpse to our solar system’s future

Nature : Thanks to data from NASA’s Kepler telescope and several ground-based observatories, a team studying a white dwarf star about 571 light-years from Earth has determined that the regular dimming of the star’s light was caused by the passing of at least one rocky body with a dusty tail. White dwarfs are the final stages of life for low-mass stars such as the Sun. The star expands into a red giant and then explodes, leaving a small, dense core where the heaviest elements fall to the star’s center. However, observations of white dwarfs have revealed that the surfaces of some are rich in heavy elements. That observation, by Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and his colleagues, suggests that those white dwarfs are absorbing material from the remnants of the planets that orbited them.