A Newly Discovered Trail of Cosmic Debris Illustrates How the End of the Solar System Could Look

The process that shaped this system could repeat itself in our own. In about 5 billion years, the sun will exhaust its fuel and expand into a red giant. During this phase, it could engulf nearby bodies, like the closest planets. It will then shed its outer layers, leaving behind a white dwarf. Any rocky bodies that survive this transformation could break apart and form a debris disk around the dead star, like the one astronomers are now observing in J1328−1450.

But the white dwarf’s two debris rings hint at another possibility. Their structure appears to be shaped by bodies that astronomers have not yet been able to identify directly. The data suggest that, following the star’s transformation, at least two planetary objects may have survived among the remnants of that system.

Researchers believe these two bodies could be very different in size. The one closest to the white dwarf would measure just a few kilometers in diameter, while the more distant one could be as large as Pluto or even the moon. Their interaction with the surrounding material would explain the formation of the two rings, although it has not yet been confirmed that they exist as separate objects. An alternative possibility is that the structure originates from different parts of a single planet-like body, such as its crust and core.

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.