You remember the fearsome "Star Wars" Death Star, right? In the fiction series, it is a powerful war space station serving the Galactic Empire, 140 kilometers in diameter, capable of carrying thousands of stormtroopers and a superlaser emerging from a crater on one of its faces that is capable of obliterate entire planets! For a group of astronomers found a real parallel to this destructive monster.

According to Charles Q. Choi of Space portal, the discovery was made last year when scientists observed - from the Very Large Telescope in Chile - an asteroid being sprayed by a white dwarf, a star that has burned all over. its hydrogen and is in the final phase of its existence. However, after further analysis of what was happening, astronomers believe the star may have annihilated 15 planets.

Death Star

According to Charles, the white dwarf is known as WD 1145 + 017 and “resides” in the constellation Virgo, about 570 light years from Earth. He said astronomers monitoring the star explained that this solar system is made up of planets that are two to four times the size of its sun, but scientists do not believe the planets are large rock bodies.

Instead, the researchers suggest that the bodies that orbit around the white dwarf are huge clouds of gas and cosmic dust from much smaller, crumbling celestial rocks.

As they said, the process of destruction has evolved rapidly since activity around the white dwarf was detected. At the time, astronomers observed that 1% of starlight was blocked by material orbiting the system, but that percentage jumped to around 10-11% over the past seven months.

Past Testimonials

This is not the first time astronomers have observed a "death star" - or rather a dead star - destroying a solar system. According to Mark Prigg of the Daily Mail portal, researchers have discovered the presence of a rocky material, such as a cloud of dust, orbiting a white dwarf just over 835, 000 kilometers from the star.

Scientists believe the scenario shows the destruction of a planetary body by the white dwarf - and that this rocky object will take 1 million years to completely disintegrate. Another example was observed by a group of astrophysicists at the University of Warwick, England, who analyzed traces of a solar system that formed a giant ring around the star SDSS1228 + 1040. See the following image:

According to scientists, the ring - similar to those on Saturn - has a diameter of 700, 000 kilometers

Future of the Solar System

Are you wondering what this all has to do with us? According to astronomers, evolutionarily speaking, our sun will become a white dwarf one day, which means that the planets of the solar system will suffer the same fate as the planetary bodies that orbit the stars of death we speak of.

Thus, when the sun burns all its fuel, it will first expand and become a red giant. Then its outermost layers will be emitted from space, and all that remains of it will be a nucleus of its former mass but concentrated in a radius similar to Earth's - that is, the Sun will have become a white dwarf, a star. dying process consisting of an extremely dense core.

On the other hand, if the mass of our Sun were tens of times larger than the original, its death would occur in the form of a spectacular and violent supernova. The event would certainly be more dramatic and grand, but for us Earthlings it would make no difference, for in the case of both the overexplosion and the sun's conversion to the death star we would have been blown away long before any of them happened. .

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