Tuesday, November 8, 2022

It's Just 90 Light Years Away...

 ...and it's very, very dead. A white dwarf not that far away from us...10.7 billion years old...has "planetary debris" around it.

It was a larger star than the sun, but did not go nova. Instead, it swelled into a red giant and then collapsed into a white dwarf...the eventual fate of our own solar system.

And now the star itself is "polluted" by debris, and it proves that there were rocky worlds in that system.

These planets...and any inhabitants...died before the Earth was formed.

Maybe we have missed our neighbors in time as well as space.

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