This dead exoplanet core could be a glimpse of the future of the Earth

Earth is currently enjoying the best moments of solar life, but this yellow and friendly earthly globe in the sky will not last forever. Whatever we do, the sun will one day destroy the world, leaving a fractured planetary corpse in orbit around a dead star. Astronomers have spotted a distant star system that could offer a glimpse into the future of the Earth. It is a white dwarf star surrounded by a destroyed planetary nucleus.

Stars like our sun have a lifespan measured in billions of years. At 4.6 billion years old, the sun is a middle-aged star. It has not changed dramatically for about 4 billion years and will remain in its current state for another 4 to 5 billion years. However, energy production will increase over time and could make the Earth inhospitable to humans in a billion years. The real show begins in about five billion years, when the sun exhausts its fuel with hydrogen and turns into a red giant. This will destroy the Earth, but maybe not as expected.

This happened to the star known as SDSS J122859.93 + 104032.9 in the distant past. This system is 410 light years away. This object is a white dwarf, an ultra-dense stellar nucleus of "degenerated matter in electrons" that remains after the outer layers of the star have been projected into space. Without normal electronic orbit around the atoms, gravity can compress the material into a white dwarf such as J122859 until it is the size of the Earth with 70% of the mass of the sun.

The Earth, as it was seen, until its eventual destruction.

Astronomers have studied this star system using the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) of 10.1 meters (34.1 feet) in the Canary Islands. The team determined that the core of the planet was about 600 km wide and a density of at least 7.7 grams per cubic centimeter. Further down, it would have been torn by the gravity of the star as it turned very close, barely 123 minutes per lap. Its properties are similar to those of the iron core of the Earth. That's why the team thinks it's the envelope of an old broken planet. This suggests that dying stars may not completely annihilate their planets but break them into pieces leaving only dense nuclei.

The team used a spectroscopic technique to detect the planetary nucleus around J122859, which is not as accurate as the transit method used by Kepler. It works on more objects, however. There are six other known white dwarf systems that could have detectable planetary nuclei.

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