![]() That’s because a white dwarf is a cosmic zombie, the corpse left behind after an aging, sun-like star swells into a red giant, sloughs off its outer layers, and collapses into a tiny, intensely hot ember. “We weren’t really looking for white dwarfs in the Kepler observations,” says Vanderburg. The first hint that the white dwarf might be behaving badly came from the Kepler space telescope, which searches for extrasolar planets by looking for the light from a star to dim as planets transit, or pass in front. ![]() The white dwarf, known as WD 1145+017, lies about 570 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Virgo. “Lots of people suspected this kind of thing must be happening,” says Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “but this is the smoking gun.” Vanderburg is lead author of a paper describing the discovery in the latest issue of Nature. Soon it will begin swallowing up the pieces. A hot, dense white dwarf star, no bigger than Earth but with as much mass as the sun, has been caught in the act of ripping an asteroid-like object to shreds. ![]()
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