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Inside the Hyades cluster — a nearby collection of stars, 150 light-years away from Earth — the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has detected a pair of dead stars that are "polluted" with the stuff of planets like our own.
"We have identified chemical evidence for the building blocks of rocky planets," researcher Jay Farihi of the University of Cambridge said in a statement Thursday (May 9). "When these stars were born, they built planets, and there's a good chance that they currently retain some of them. The signs of rocky debris we are seeing are evidence of this — it is at least as rocky as the most primitive terrestrial bodies in our solar system."
Most stars, including our own sun, will end their lives as dense and dim stellar cores called white dwarfs. Farihi and his team sought out signs of planet formation in these types of retired stars in the Hyades cluster, a 625-million-year-old grouping of stars in the constellation of Taurus.
White dwarf atmospheres are typically quite "clean," with heavier elements clumping in the core, as Ben Zuckerman, a physics and astronomy professor at UCLA, told scientists at the American Astronomical Society meeting earlier this year.
Read more here.
"We have identified chemical evidence for the building blocks of rocky planets," researcher Jay Farihi of the University of Cambridge said in a statement Thursday (May 9). "When these stars were born, they built planets, and there's a good chance that they currently retain some of them. The signs of rocky debris we are seeing are evidence of this — it is at least as rocky as the most primitive terrestrial bodies in our solar system."
Most stars, including our own sun, will end their lives as dense and dim stellar cores called white dwarfs. Farihi and his team sought out signs of planet formation in these types of retired stars in the Hyades cluster, a 625-million-year-old grouping of stars in the constellation of Taurus.
White dwarf atmospheres are typically quite "clean," with heavier elements clumping in the core, as Ben Zuckerman, a physics and astronomy professor at UCLA, told scientists at the American Astronomical Society meeting earlier this year.
Read more here.
