What Happens to Solar Systems When Stars Become White Dwarfs?

In this artist's illustration, lumps of debris from a disrupted planetesimal are irregularly spaced on a long and eccentric orbit around a white dwarf. Individual clouds of rubble intermittently pass in front of the white dwarf, blocking some of its light. Because of the various sizes of the fragments in these clumps, the brightness of the white dwarf flickers in a chaotic way.

The Sun will be a red giant for about one billion years. After that, it will undergo a series of more rapid changes, shrinking and expanding again. But the mayhem doesn’t end there. New research published in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society digs into the issue. The title is “,” and the lead author is Dr. Amornrat Aungwerojwit of Naresuan University in Thailand.

This Hubble Space Telescope shows Sirius, with its white dwarf companion Sirius B to the lower left. Sirius B is the closest white dwarf to the Sun. Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Bond and M. Barstow . Professor Boris Gaensicke of the University of Warwick is one of the study’s co-authors. “The simple fact that we can detect the debris of asteroids, maybe moons or even planets whizzing around a white dwarf every couple of hours is quite mind-blowing, but our study shows that the behaviour of these systems can evolve rapidly, in a matter of a few years,” Gaensicke said.

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