Dwarf star only 200 light-years away from our planet possesses all the elements for ensuring life. The white dwarf star identified in the constellation Bootes maintains an atmosphere full of carbon and nitrogen, and even the components for water.
Researchers state the planetary system linked to this star could be much like our solar system, indicating that some of the elements that permit rise to life are not all that unusual.
The team stated that a minor planet moved too close to the star and was scattered by the powerful gravitational field, ripping it aside into gas and dust. These traces then moved into orbit around the white dwarf, such as the rings around Saturn, and finally spiraled into the star itself. After that, they returned the building blocks for life with them. Researchers identified nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in the white dwarf’s atmosphere.
This Dwarf Star Possesses Elements for All Times
They also estimated that approximately 30 % of the minor planet’s weight was water and other ices, while 70 % was formed of rocky elements. Such a planet could be the first one of many analogs to objects in the Kuiper Belt – a bunch of small cosmic features in the outer parts of the solar system.
Siyi Xu, a postdoctoral scholar at the European Southern Observatory in Germany, explained: “If there is water in Kuiper belt-like objects around other stars, as there now appears to be, then when rocky planets form they need not contain life’s ingredients.”
The Kuiper Belt is a freezing circle of matter orbiting more than 4 billion miles from the sun. It is known that the remains of the aggressive and messy collisions that conducted to the creation of the planets. In the Kuiper Belt, there are approximately 33,000 objects more than 60 meters across the belt and three dwarf planets.
