More than 13 billion years have passed since the creation of the universe. It has seen several planetary systems grow old, die and grow old. Astronomers have now discovered the remains of the Milky Way’s oldest solar system, which is about 90 light-years from Earth.
Astronomers have spotted the oldest star in the Milky Way currently burning up debris from planetesimals. This planetary system with a faint white dwarf star is one of the oldest known icy and rocky planetary systems in the galaxy.
A white dwarf star is a type of star that has already gone through a process of burning up its fuel and then cooling and shrinking. Because of this, most stars, including our Sun, are destined to become white dwarfs. According to scientists, if a star loses its life, its planetary neighbors will most likely be destroyed.
Details of the results published in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices have been announced. Astronomers have been able to model two white dwarf stars discovered by the European Space Agency’s GAIA space observatory.
One of the stars was seen as blue while the other was red. It is the faintest and reddest white dwarf star observed in the vicinity.
According to Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, a physics professor at the University of Warwick, the discovery of white dwarfs offers an opportunity to study the process of planet formation in a gas- and metal-poor environment. “Conditions were different when the solar system formed, and the observed white dwarfs provide us with an unprecedented window into the evolution of planetary systems.
To determine the cooling duration of white dwarf star WDJ2147-4035, the team used data collected from various space observatories such as the X‑Shooter instrument and the Dark Energy Survey. The star is about ten billion years old.
