Anyone hungry for the icy crunch of a Pluto-like body? No? Well, one nearby white dwarf is going all in on a Pluto-esque snack.
According to NASA, the Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a “burned-out star” snacking on a “fragment of a Pluto-like object” that’s not too far from Earth — only about 260 light-years away, which is very close when considering the vastness of the cosmos. However, it’s not actually the snacking itself that’s fascinating, but rather the icy composition of the exo-Pluto. The object appears to be filled with volatiles like carbon, sulphur, nitrogen and oxygen, which indicate the presence of water. According to Hubble data, the exo-Pluto comprises 64% water ice.
“We were surprised. We did not expect to find water or other icy content,” Snehalata Sahu of the University of Warwick, who led the analysis of a Hubble survey of white dwarfs, said in a statement. “This is because the comets and Kuiper Belt–like objects are thrown out of their planetary systems early, as their stars evolve into white dwarfs. But here, we are detecting this very volatile-rich material.”
This white dwarf was once a sun-like star, but after it burned up its fuel, it collapsed into an extremely dense stellar remnant. Given the dwarf’s intense gravitational pull, scientists believe it drew in a Pluto-like planetesimal from its own version of the Kuiper Belt — a region in our solar system filled with icy bodies, from comets to dwarf planets — and tore it apart. What Hubble has captured is just the remaining fragments of the exo-Pluto, something it’s uniquely qualified to do with its Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which analyzes both near- and far-ultraviolet wavelengths.
Studying the white dwarf and the exo-Pluto fragments is like looking into the future of our own solar system. Eventually, the sun will also turn into a white dwarf, pulling in not only planets, but also icy Kuiper Belt objects. “If an alien observer looks into our solar system in the far future, they might see the same kind of remains we see today around this white dwarf,” says Sahu.
Next up, the team hopes to use NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to study the white dwarf and the exo-Pluto in infrared light.
The team’s research was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Sept. 18.
