White dwarfs are, along with red dwarfs, the most abundant stars in the universe. Now, thanks to research carried out by a team of astronomers from the University of Leicester (United Kingdom) and the University of Arizona (USA), one of the great mysteries of celestial archeology has been solved for more than 20 years : the Hot white dwarfs are contaminated by debris of planetary material.
The discovery, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , was made possible by in-depth investigation of 89 hot young white dwarfs , as well as remnants of super-dense stars that eventually faded and collapsed through space. To obtain their spectra (and with them the carbon, silicon, phosphorus and sulfur footprint of the atmosphere), they used the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer .
Hot white dwarfs dwarf atmospheres, since elements such as iron, carbon or silicon contaminate pure hydrogen or pure helium, but the origin of these elements, called metals, was unknown until now . “The exact origin of the metals has been a mystery and the extreme differences in their abundance between the stars could not be explained,” says Martin Barstow, Vice Chancellor of the University of Leicester and author of the study.
Researchers have discovered that many of these stars, around a third of all existing hot white dwarfs, show signs of contamination by rocky material left over from a planetary system, so these stars have been “gobbling up” debris from other systems planetariums .
Finally, the study predicts that the final fate of the Earth will end in the same way : as a pollution inside the Sun.
Crédito Imagen: NASA, ESA, STScI, and G. Bacon (STScI)
