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Astronomers have spotted an unusual sign that a dead star feasted on a fragment of a planet orbiting it: a metal scar on the star’s surface. The revelation sheds light on the dynamic nature of planetary systems even in the end stages of a star’s life cycle — and could foretell the eventual fate of our own solar system, according to the scientists.

Planets form from swirls of gas and dust called a protoplanetary disk that surrounds a newly formed star. But as the star ages and dies, the stellar object can consume the very planets and asteroids it helped create.

Astronomers observed a dead star, known as a white dwarf, located about 63 light-years away from Earth using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. The observation revealed a metallic feature on the star’s surface that the researchers determined was related to a change detected in the star’s magnetic field. A new study detailing the observation appeared Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

As Space.com reports, the uber-powerful James Webb Space Telescope and its predecessor, the Hubble, have observed a super-long gamma-ray burst (GRB) that occurred when two dense neutron stars collided millions of years ago — and the result, as the telescopes’ instruments detected, was quite literally pure gold.

Neutron stars are the rare result of supernovas, or the explosions associated with dying stars, that don’t turn into black holes. Earlier this week, in fact, the JWST was used to detect the neutron star at the heart of a well-known supernova that scientists believed existed but couldn’t see until now.

Because these bodies are, essentially, small and dense balls of mass, it’s not surprising that something huge happens when they collide. With the power of these two magnificent telescopes, scientists from the University of Rome were able to spot the bright shine, known as a kilonova, of the heavy elements like silver and gold created in the dead stars’ turbulent merger.