Real- life "Death Star"- compared to a "Star Wars" franchise's spacecraft that can destroy a planet, is spotted destroying a small and rocky world in a far, far away solar system.
Tech Times reports that the white dwarf has been spotted gorging a rocky body that was in its deadly orbit, which is seen for the very first time by people and has been reported by scientists on Oct. 21, Wednesday.
A rocky object that is disintegrating, spiraled toward a distant white dwarf that rips it apart by gravity, which astronomers have discovered, Express says. The said rocky object is a planet that is about 570 light-years away from the Earth in the Virgo constellation.
Andrew Vanderburg, a graduate student from the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and his team reported to "Nature" journal their groundbreaking observations from the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Kepler spacecraft of the WD 1145+017 in the act of gobbling a disintegrating body of a massive rock.
The "Death Star" then rips it apart and turns it into dust while the star was observed to flicker asymmetrically and fading away gradually. NDTV reveals that this is an unusual phenomenon and its findings though were observed previously.
The pattern of "Death Star" indicates an irregular shaped object as a comet with a trailing tail that is believed by the scientists as the cloud of dusty debris caused by an object's disintegration that is being pulled apart by the strong gravity of this said dense star. Its gravity pulls down any heavy element such as silicon, iron, and calcium.
White Dwarfs are actually the hot debris of sun-like stars that died with swollen and discarded outer layers. In other words, they ran out of hydrogen fuel, started to cool, and expanded into a huge red giant that later on shriveled into so-called white dwarfs.
