'Star Wars' Death Star Destroys A Real Planet; White Dwarf Destroys An Asteroid Sized Planet

The Death Star destroys a planet just like in the movie "Star Wars" but this one is for real. Astronomers declared today that a large, rocky object is falling into pieces just far- off the white dwarf star. It also proved an old theory about a white dwarf "pollution", according to Harvard Gazette.

White dwarfs are dead fragment that are once stars closely like the sun. In the future, the sun will turn into a cool red giant, into a death star and lose half of its mass, written on Design and Trend.

570 light years away from the Earth, a death star destroys a planet that is a size of an asteroid and was found orbiting in the Virgo Constellation. The distance is about twice the distance between the moon and the Earth, according to The Washington Post.

With the use of the Kepler telescope called the K2, researchers were able to find the destroyed rocky planet. K2 showed scientists the different brightness of stars. A dimming pattern from the white dwarf detected an uneven shaped object and might be cause by the dusty fragments, which is pulled by the star's strong gravity.

"This is something no human has seen before," Andrew Vanderburg, the lead author of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said, according to The Washington Post.

The light coming from the white star revealed surfaces of other elements and rich metals after decades of analyses. The surface includes elements like, calcium, iron and aluminum and the estimated vaporized matter every second is about eight million kilograms because of the star's strong heat, says an astronomer at the University of California, Michael Jura, reported on Nature.

 Observing the disintegrating pieces of planets is giving as a peek of our future, "The situation is something that's likely to happen to our own Solar System," Andrew Vanderburg added on Nature.