Scientists have discovered a white dwarf star about 170 light years from the Earth using NASA’s Hubble space telescope, and the best part of this discovery is that the atmosphere of the white dwarf star is rich in basic building blocks for life – such as nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.
According to scientists, the white dwarf star WD 1425+540 is located in the Bootes constellation. It was first recorded in 1974 and is part of a wide binary system. It also has a companion star located at a distance about 2,000 times the distance between Earth and sun.
In this study, the astronomers focused on WD 1425+540 white dwarf star, but found evidence that the planetary system of this star contains ingredients or basic building blocks of life.
“The findings indicate that some of life’s important preconditions are common in the universe,” said study co-author Benjamin Zuckerman, Professor at University of California, Los Angeles.
It is generally believed that Earth was first formed, it was a dry planet, and it was millions of years later that the building blocks for life appeared on it due to Earth’s collisions with other objects in solar system that had those elements.
White dwarf stars are dense, burned-out remains of normal stars. Researchers, in this study, describe how the white dwarf came to obtain carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen. The study reveals that initially a minor planet—made up of 70% rocky material and 30% water and other ices—was orbiting around the white dwarf, but then its trajectory altered most likely due to gravitational pull of some other planet in the system, causing the minor planet come close to the white dwarf, and eventually being ripped apart due to the intense gravitational field of the white dwarf star. The gas and dust produced first started orbiting the white dwarf and then spiraled onto the star. This gas and dust brought with them the building blocks for life. According to the research team, these events occurred probably in the past 100,000 years or so.
The white dwarf’s atmosphere was studied using both Hubble and the W. M. Keck Observatory. Hubble was used to measure carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, silicon, iron, nickel, and hydrogen on the star, while Keck provided measurements for calcium, magnesium, and hydrogen.
Siyi Xu of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, who led the team, says this is the first instance of nitrogen being detected in the planetary debris that fell onto a white dwarf.
“Nitrogen is a very important element for life as we know it,” Xu said.
“This particular object is quite rich in nitrogen, more so than any object observed in our solar system,” Xu added.
The team also believes that minor planet may have originally existed in the equivalent of our solar system’s Kuiper belt.
“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,” says Xu.
“Now we’re seeing in a planetary system outside our solar system that there are minor planets where water, nitrogen and carbon are present in abundance, as in our solar system’s Kuiper belt.”
“If Earth obtained its water, nitrogen and carbon from the impact of such objects, then rocky planets in other planetary systems could also obtain their water, nitrogen and carbon this way.”
The detailed findings of the study have been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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