Dance of the dead planet signals life

A white dwarf star - the remains of the dead gold star rotate and tear the planet near it, sparking the assumption that many similar planets are moving around the dwarf.

The dance of a white dwarf

According to The Verge, more than 570 light-years away from the constellation Virgo, there is a crumbling planet moving around a white dwarf. The one who destroyed the planet is a white dwarf. It is very dense and the suction force is so great that the rock crumbles, creating a giant cloud of dust following the planet.

The dance of the Kepler spaceship star of the US Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) was discovered last year, and reported in the October 21 issue of Nature. This is the first discovery of this planetary system. It helps confirm what many scientists have suspected for years: the planet can orbit around white dwarfs.

The white dwarf tore the meteorite flying near it.(Photo: Mark Garlick).

Experts estimate that at least 15% of dwarfs have planets or debris around, but no one has observed which planets pass through these stars before.

"This is the first time we have encountered this scene," said Andrew Vanderburg, lead author of the report and astronomer at Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

This discovery could boost the search for intact orbiting planets around white dwarfs, helping to find life beyond Earth. Some astronomers argue that Earth-like planets may be moving around white dwarfs at a moderate distance, with the ideal temperature for water to exist and form life. Such planets will be the same size as the dwarf that it orbits around, so it can be easily observed. They will also cover part of the light as they move through the dwarf, helping researchers to easily locate and understand what is on their surface.

The planet orbits a dwarf

Perhaps any planet orbiting a white dwarf in the area where life can exist has undergone many events.A white dwarf is the remains of a dead star. A star that uses its inherent atomic fuel will become a red giant with a 100-fold increase in size compared to its original size. Any nearby planet will be swallowed by it. This can happen to the Earth when the Sun dies at 5 billion years.

Sirius B. White dwarf (Photo: NASA).

Eventually, this red giant will shrink and shake off the outer layers, becoming smaller and denser. Dwarfs, remnants of the inner core of the original star, are formed. Dwarfs may be dimmer but still produce very large amounts of heat. Several billion years later, it began to cool and reached the surface temperature like that of the Sun.

It is possible that any planet outside the solar system that once orbits a star persists after the star turns into a white dwarf. However, the massive change in the star's mass can make the planet deviate a bit.

"The mass of the star determines the orbit of the planet , " Vanderburg said. "When the mass of stars changes, the trajectory also changes." According to Vanderburg, this could cause some planets to collide with each other, and one of them might "kick" another planet into orbit near a dwarf. Theoretically, this explains where a planet becomes alive.

Although it was a specially anticipated process, it could help explain the formation of the white dwarf system that Vanderburg discovered.

The universe is in decline

This white dwarf named WD 1145 + 017 was discovered by NASA astronomical astronaut Kepler. It is part of the mission of the ship named K2. Because of this mission, the Kepler ship must constantly observe a sky zone for 80 days. Between July and early September last year, Kepler caught a noticeable signal about WD 1145 + 017 dwarf, attracting the interest of Vanderburg. The star faded a little, signaling that something was about to pass through it.

Vanderburg and his colleagues began tracking the star with a ground-based telescope to see if they could be certain that something was about to move through it. The star fades in cycles, proving that this judgment is correct. However, these cycles are not the same. At times, the star's duration fades longer than expected and the distance between cycles is different. Normally, when a planet passes through a star, it will dim the star in a predictable cycle because the planet's orbit is symmetrical and stable.

Therefore, the researchers suggest that this dwarf is blurred by the comet's tail that separates from a crumbling smaller planet. According to them, the planet is "kicked" too close to the WD white dwarf 1145 + 017, causing it to be crushed by the star's attraction. The debris forming a giant dust cloud obscures the light of the dwarf with each cycle.

"The dust cloud is much larger in size than the planet core, and larger objects are easier to see than small objects," Vanderburg said.

The illustration of the polluted planet (right) revolves around a white dwarf.(Photo: Christine Pulliam / Harvard).

Extraterrestrial life

If life really exists around white dwarfs, it is much easier to find life here than in other planets. Since scientists discovered that a white dwarf 1145 + 017 shreds a planet near it, the chances of life exist on this planet are gone. However, if this act moves on a slightly more orbit than a dwarf, life may already exist.

"This planet is so close to dwarfs," said Avi Loeb, Harvard astronomy professor. "If you are nearly twice as short as a dwarf compared to the area where there is a possibility of life, you risk being crushed by its attraction."

Loeb thinks that if a planet is in a region with the possibility of survival around dwarfs, we can easily study and learn about it. Astronomers can study light through the planet's atmosphere, and see what gases there are, when the planet passes through dwarfs. This is almost impossible for the extrasolar planets orbiting a particular star, as they will be drowned out by the star's brightness.

Studying the planet's atmosphere can tell us a lot about the composition of the universe. In some of his writings, Loeb thinks that some gases in the planet's atmosphere may signal the existence of life.

"The amount of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere, if there is no life, will decrease in about a million years," Loeb said. "We have atmospheric oxygen mainly because we have life." Loeb said that gases such as methane or oxygen produced by organic substances could be a sign of life that exists on the planet outside the solar system at some point.

Loeb also argued that we could find an intelligent creature on the planet outside the solar system by searching for chemical wastes in the atmosphere. It is possible that certain civilized creatures in the universe pumped artificial gas into the air. But to find these gases, pollution levels must be 10-100 times the level of air pollution on Earth.

"You might think that if they pollute so much, they are not smart , " Loeb said. But according to him, perhaps because their planet is far away from dwarfs, they have to create a thick layer of pollution to warm it up and create better living conditions.

Now these are just hypotheses, because no one has the opportunity to study any planet outside the solar system around a dwarf. But Loeb and Vanderburg hoped that discovering the declining universe could stimulate others to study more about white dwarfs and planets orbiting it.