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Astronomers have discover a weird white dwarf wiz with a metallic scar on its control surface — the last leftover of a hapless planet consumed by the killer star .
The white dwarf , phone WD 0816 - 310 , is a superdense husk of a dead star situate 63 wanton - years from Earth . astronomer previously assumed that the fragments of planets or asteroidsshredded and consume by clean dwarfsare finally spread equally across their open .
An artist’s impression of the white dwarf star.
But raw observations of the Earth - size coal of the dead wiz , published Feb. 26 inThe Astrophysical Journal Letters , has give away that the leftovers from one of its meals became locked in place by hefty magnetic theater , creating a benighted metallic streak across its surface .
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" It is well known that some whitened dwarfs — tardily cooling ember of star like our Sun — are cannibalising small-arm of their terrestrial system , " leave authorStefano Bagnulo , an uranologist at Armagh Observatory and Planetarium in Northern Ireland , say in a statement . " Now we have let on that the genius ’s magnetic playing area play a key role in this process , lead in a scar on the white midget ’s open . "
livid dwarfs class when genius between one - tenth and eight times the passel of the sun execute out of fuel for nuclearfusion . When this happens , the stars slough off their out layer like the rind of a fruit , revealing a compact , thick , white - hot gist that slowly cools over time .
About 97 % of the stars in theMilky Way , including the Sunday , are destined to become clean dwarfs , according to a 2001 field of study in the journalPublications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific . Still , the compositions and capableness of these ultradense balls stay inscrutable in many ways .
To investigate WD 0816 - 310 , the research worker used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to monitor the bloodless nanus for two months . They mark that as the zombie star circumvolve on its axis , the metal the telescope picked up changed apace and match up with changes in the white dwarf’smagnetic field .
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take together , these two reflection inculpate that WD 0816 - 310 ’s polar magnetic field had " funneled " the metal remnant of one of its meals onto one of the white dwarf ’s magnetised poles , leaving behind a scar .
" This scar is a concentrated patch of world-wide material , held in shoes by the same magnetized field that has channelize the infalling fragment , " co - authorJohn Landstreet , a prof emeritus at the University of Western Ontario and a visiting professor at the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium , say in the statement . " Nothing like this has been see before . "
The research worker call back that by finding more of the scarred straw , they could make headway some unparalleled perceptiveness into star systems beyond our own — even if the observations are being made foresighted after these system ' dying .
