Humanity Witnesses the Death of a Solar System, and the Emerge of Necroplanetology

We know for sure that our Solar System will cease to exist one day, and there’s pretty much nothing we can do about it. Unless technology will be much more developed until that day and we’ll figure out a way to stop the Sun from drastically increasing its volume as it engulfs the planets and later becoming a supernova.

Luckily for us, we have a lot of time until that grim scenario can become reality: about 5 billion years. For the moment, humanity managed to witness the death of another solar system located 570 light-years away.

WD 1145+017 is the star of the show

Astronomers discovered this star and saw that it’s irregularly dimming. This automatically triggered their curiosity, and they found out that the phenomenon was caused by the star engulfing its surrounding planets through a process dubbed ‘tidal disruption’.

WD 1145+017 (also known as EPIC 201563164) is a white dwarf star, so there’s no wonder how it has such powerful gravitational pull in order to devour its surrounding planets. White dwarfs are by definition extremely dense, which automatically causes more powerful gravitational pull than usual stars. Isaac Newton discovered that as the mass of an object increases, the gravitational attraction of that object will increase as well.

Necroplanetology emerges

This is a brand new field of science that was born along with seeing the WD 1145+017 star engulfing its planets. It’s not difficult at all to understand how the ‘necroplanetology’ word formed. Planetology means the study of planets, while the other part comes from the Greek word ‘nekros’, which means ‘dead’ or ‘corpse’.

The discovery of the planet-eating star was made by an international team of scientists from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Warwick University in the U.K. They first published the findings in 2015. The discovery has now been accepted for the Astrophysical Journal for review.

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