Related topics: white dwarfs

Rogue planets: hunting the galaxy's most mysterious worlds

Most known planets orbit a star. These planets, including Earth, benefit from the star's warmth and light. And it is the light emitted from these stars which makes it possible for us to see them. But there are also "invisible" ...

White dwarf may have shredded passing planet

The destruction of a planet may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of astronomers has found evidence that this may have happened in an ancient cluster of stars at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy.

Hubble watching ancient orbs

(Phys.org)—This sparkling picture taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the center of globular cluster M 4. The power of Hubble has resolved the cluster into a multitude of glowing orbs, each a colossal nuclear ...

Supercharged light pulverises asteroids, study finds

The majority of stars in the universe will become luminous enough to blast surrounding asteroids into successively smaller fragments using their light alone, according to a University of Warwick astronomer.

Solar systems around dead Suns?

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers have found that at least 1 in 100 white dwarf stars show evidence of orbiting asteroids and rocky planets, suggesting these objects ...

Rocky exoplanets are even stranger than we thought

An astronomer from NSF's NOIRLab has teamed up with a geologist from California State University, Fresno, to make the first estimates of rock types that exist on planets orbiting nearby stars. After studying the chemical ...

Runaway binary stars

CfA astronomers made a remarkable and fortuitous discovery in 2005: an extremely fast moving star, clocked going over three million kilometers an hour. It appears to have been ejected from the vicinity of the galactic center's ...

Vaporised crusts of Earth-like planets found in dying stars

Remnants of planets with Earth-like crusts have been discovered in the atmospheres of four nearby white dwarf stars by University of Warwick astronomers, offering a glimpse of the planets that may have once orbited them up ...

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