A Newly Discovered Trail of Cosmic Debris Illustrates How the End of the Solar System Could Look
The process that shaped this system could repeat itself in our own. In about 5 billion years, the sun will exhaust its fuel and expand into a red giant. During this phase, it could engulf nearby bodies, like the closest planets. It will then shed its outer layers, leaving behind a white dwarf. Any rocky bodies that survive this transformation could break apart and form a debris disk around the dead star, like the one astronomers are now observing in J1328−1450.
But the white dwarf’s two debris rings hint at another possibility. Their structure appears to be shaped by bodies that astronomers have not yet been able to identify directly. The data suggest that, following the star’s transformation, at least two planetary objects may have survived among the remnants of that system.
Researchers believe these two bodies could be very different in size. The one closest to the...
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