Earth’s final days are in the distant future, but the the death of a far-off solar system revealed in images from Kepler 2 shows how the world might end
The destruction of a solar system has been captured for the first time by astronomers who said the violent events provide a grim glimpse of
Earth’s ultimate fate.
Images taken by Nasa’s Kepler 2 space mission reveal the rocky remains of a world that is being torn apart as it spirals around a dead star, or white dwarf, in the constellation of Virgo, 570 light years from Earth.
Scientists spotted chunks of shredded planet swinging around the white dwarf every 4.5 to five hours, placing them in an orbit about 520,000 miles from the star, about twice the distance between the Earth and the moon.
“This is something no human has seen before,” said Andrew Vanderburg at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “We’re watching a solar system get destroyed.”
Sun-like stars are driven by nuclear reactions that [...]
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