---
title: "A Real “Death Star”—White Dwarf Caught Destroying a Tiny Planet"
description: "Astronomers using the Kepler Space Telescope have caught an ancient white dwarf consuming a small planetoid—a possible forecast of the future of our own Solar System, even of the Earth itself."
date: "2016-04-11"
modified: "2016-04-11"
authors:
  - name: "Todd Jaquith"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/todd-jaquith"
url: "https://futurism.com/real-death-starwhite-dwarf-caught-destroying-tiny-planet"
categories:
  - "Off-World"
  - "Space"
tags:
  - "K2Mission"
  - "Kepler space telescope"
  - "red giant"
  - "white dwarf"
---

# A Real “Death Star”—White Dwarf Caught Destroying a Tiny Planet

![](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/NASAs-K2-Finds-Dead-Star-Vaporizing-a-Mini-Planet-A.jpg>)
*\<em\>Image: \<a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2015-321" target="\_blank"\> CfA/Mark A. Garlick\</a\>\</em\>*

Astronomers have mined data from the [Kepler Space Telescope](<http://keplerscience.arc.nasa.gov>), NASA’s planet-hunter, to discover a miniature planet in the act of being shredded by its star. The discovery was made as part of the K2 mission, Kepler’s post-main phase repurposing.

What they found was a curious transiting signal of an object that seemed to exhibit a “cometary” signature—an indication of something being vaporized. The object is about the size of a large asteroid, something like [Ceres](<https://futurism.com/study-ceres-bright-spots-shows-changing>) in our own Solar System, in a close, 4.5-hour orbit about the white dwarf WD 1145+017.

The discovery is more than coldly academic—it may be a vision of our own Solar System’s distant future. White dwarfs are the cinders of dead stars, packing something like half the Sun’s mass in a volume scarcely larger than the Earth’s; [our own life-giving Sun is expected to become one in eight billion years or so](<https://futurism.com/heres-what-it-will-look-like-when-the-sun-becomes-a-red-giant-earth-burns-video>).

With current technology, it is, of course, impossible to say whether the tortured planetesimal is the ancient remnant of some once life-bearing planet, like the Earth, or whether it’s something that formed more recently, from the cast-off material of its dying star.

In any case, it seems to answer the question of why certain white dwarfs possess heavier elements than the standard hydrogen/helium in their atmospheres—[they consume their own retinue of worlds](<http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/white-dwarf-may-have-shredded-passing-planet.html>), polluting their pure gaseous envelopes with the crumbs of their cannibalistic repasts.

https://youtu.be/15FIcRr9A0U

### Author social links  
[Facebook](<https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100010429595677>)  
[LinkedIn](<https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-jaquith-b5aaa7127>)