Dead Star's Last Meal Reveals What Alien Planets Are Really Made Of

What's the best way to reveal what an exoplanet is made of? Wait for it to get gravitationally shredded and engulfed by its star, of course!

Astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaiʻi, have spotted such a gruesome glimpse of stellar cannibalism: a dead Sun-like star gobbling up the remains of its shattered planet – more than 3 billion years after said star became a white dwarf.

This delayed destruction is more than surprising; it "challenges our understanding of planetary system evolution," says astrophysicist Érika Le Bourdais of the University of Montreal in Canada, the paper's first author.

This discovery also offers a chilling look at what may occur in our own Solar System, more than 5 billion years in the future after our Sun expels its outer layers