{"id":184843,"date":"2024-03-10T12:22:52","date_gmt":"2024-03-10T17:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/metal-scar-found-on-cannibal-star"},"modified":"2024-03-10T12:22:52","modified_gmt":"2024-03-10T17:22:52","slug":"metal-scar-found-on-cannibal-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/metal-scar-found-on-cannibal-star","title":{"rendered":"Metal Scar found on Cannibal Star"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/metal-scar-found-on-cannibal-star2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When a star like our Sun reaches the end of its life, it can ingest the surrounding planets and asteroids that were born with it. Now, using the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope (ESO\u2019s VLT) in Chile, researchers have found a unique signature of this process for the first time \u2014 a scar imprinted on the surface of a white dwarf star. The results are published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt is well known that some white dwarfs \u2014 slowly cooling embers of stars like our Sun \u2014 are cannibalising pieces of their planetary systems. Now we have discovered that the star\u2019s magnetic field plays a key role in this process, resulting in a scar on the white dwarf\u2019s surface,\u201d says Stefano Bagnulo, an astronomer at Armagh Observatory and Planetarium in Northern Ireland, UK, and lead author of the study.<\/p>\n<p>The scar the team observed is a concentration of metals imprinted on the surface of the white dwarf WD 0816\u2013310, the Earth-sized remnant of a star similar to, but somewhat larger than, our Sun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When a star like our Sun reaches the end of its life, it can ingest the surrounding planets and asteroids that were born with it. Now, using the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope (ESO\u2019s VLT) in Chile, researchers have found a unique signature of this process for the first time \u2014 a scar imprinted [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184843\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}