{"id":901739,"date":"2026-11-01T03:46:40","date_gmt":"2026-11-01T03:46:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/901739\/"},"modified":"2026-11-01T03:46:40","modified_gmt":"2026-11-01T03:46:40","slug":"dead-star-discovery-shows-what-will-happen-to-earth-when-the-sun-burns-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/901739\/","title":{"rendered":"Dead star discovery shows what will happen to Earth when the Sun burns out"},"content":{"rendered":"

The discovery of a dead star<\/a> has offered a rare insight into the fate of the Earth when our own Sun burns out. <\/p>\n

An international team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope<\/a> (VLT) in Chile found an unusual disc of debris surrounding a white dwarf<\/a> \u2013 the dense, burnt-out core of a star known as J1328\u22121450.<\/p>\n

The debris, which consists of the remains of planets that once orbited the star, formed two distinct rings of material separated by a gap.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe system is a rare glimpse of the violent, chaotic process by which a planetary system meets its end, and it hints that dead stars can have disc structures far more complex than previously realised,\u201d said Gentile Fusillo, who is affiliated with the INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Trieste.<\/p>\n

The astronomers believed the structure of the discs is maintained by two planet-like bodies, one of which has similar properties to an asteroid and the other is similar in size to the Moon.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

The white dwarf J1328\u22121450 was suspected to have a planetary system that was vaporized to rubble as the star died, and this debris ended up arranged in a disk like the one shown here (ESO\/L. Cal\u00e7ada)<\/p>\n

The findings were published in the journal Nature Astronomy in a paper<\/a> titled \u2018A double debris disc around a white dwarf sculpted by two planetary bodies\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have known for some time that planets may survive beyond the transformation of their central star, but this is the first example of a complex system with a double debris disc and potentially two surviving planetesimals,\u201d said Nicola Gentile Fusillo, an astronomer at the University of Trieste in Italy and lead author of the study.<\/p>\n

When stars like the Sun run out of fuel, they shed their outer layers and destroy nearby planets to create a disc of debris<\/p>\n

When white dwarfs have been observed in the past, the disc of debris has appeared as a single, flat structure.<\/p>\n

Observations with the VLT of J1328-1450 instead revealed two concentric rings of gaseous material separated by a distinct gap.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe structure we see in this system is particularly intriguing because the two gaseous rings are remarkably stable and remain separated by a gap,\u201d said co-author Felipe Lagos-Vilches, an astronomer at the University of Warwick<\/a> in the UK and the Universidad T\u00e9cnica Federico Santa Mar\u00eda in Chile.<\/p>\n

The debris disc also contained calcium, oxygen and magnesium, suggesting that the planets that were engulfed by the burnt-out star were made up of similar materials to the planets found in our Solar System<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Our Sun is expected is expected to expand into a red giant in several billion years, before fully burning out and becoming a white dwarf.<\/p>\n

The process will likely destroy Earth, judging by the observations made of J1328-1450, but some outer planets may survive.<\/p>\n

Dr Lagos-Vilches said: \u201cThe system therefore offers a remarkable glimpse of what the future of planetary systems, including systems like our own, might look like.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The discovery of a dead star has offered a rare insight into the fate of the Earth when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":901740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[79],"class_list":["post-901739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/901740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}