Archivo de imágenes de Hubble

Impresión artística de una enana blanca 'contaminada' con desechos planetarios

This is an artist's impression of a burned-out star, called a white dwarf, accreting rocky debris left behind by the star's surviving planetary system. At lower right, an asteroid can be seen falling toward a Saturn-like disk of dust that is encircling the dead star. Infalling as...

Fecha
Jan 1, 2013
Misión
Hubble Space Telescope
ID de archivo
hubblesite-images-2013-18-3178-image
Por

This is an artist's impression of a burned-out star, called a white dwarf, accreting rocky debris left behind by the star's surviving planetary system. At lower right, an asteroid can be seen falling toward a Saturn-like disk of dust that is encircling the dead star. Infalling asteroids pollute the white dwarf's atmosphere with silicon. This element is not found in white dwarfs, but it is part of a rocky planet's composition. This "planetary chemistry" implies that the white dwarf's progenitor star had planets composed of Earth-like material, and that such planets are common around stars. The telltale chemical fingerprints were identified by the Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The dead star is one of two observed by Hubble in the Hyades star cluster, 150 light-years from Earth.

Credits

NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

Detalles de la imagen

About The Data
Data DescriptionThe image was created from Hubble data from proposal : B. Gaensicke (University of Warwick), D. Koester (Universitat Kiel), J. Farihi (Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge), and J. Girven (University of Warwick).

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