Alien on tiny planet
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Periodic dimming of starlight indicates the presence of an object inĪ research team led by Vanderburg found an unusual, but vaguelyįamiliar pattern in the data.
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Point of the space telescope, a dip in starlight is recorded. When an object transits or passes in front of a star from the vantage Measuring the miniscule change in brightness of the distant white dwarf.
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21,Ģ014, K2 trained its gaze on a patch of sky in the constellation Virgo, Searing heat and shearing gravitational force.ĭuring its first observing campaign from to Aug. This orbital period places it extremely close to the white dwarf and its It orbits its white dwarf, WD 1145+017, once every 4.5 hours. The devastated planetesimal, or cosmic object formed from dust, rock,Īnd other materials, is estimated to be the size of a large asteroid,Īnd is the first planetary object to be confirmed transiting a whiteĭwarf. This dead, dense star remnant is called a white dwarf. Massachusetts, and lead author of the paper published in Nature.Īs stars like our sun age, they puff up into red giants and then gradually lose about half their mass, shrinking down to 1/100 th of their original size to roughly the size of Earth. Material onto its star,” said Andrew Vanderburg, graduate student fromĪt the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, “We are for the first time witnessing a miniature “planet” rippedĪpart by intense gravity, being vaporized by starlight and raining rocky Validates a long-held theory that white dwarfs are capable ofĬannibalizing possible remnant planets that have survived within its The K2 mission, have uncovered strong evidence of a tiny, rocky objectīeing torn apart as it spirals around a white dwarf star. Scientists using NASA’s repurposed Kepler space telescope, known as