A Dead Star Has Been Caught Ripping Apart Its Planetary System - ScienceAlert

Well, if that star is a certain white dwarf 86 light-years away, those planets are currently in the process of being torn apart and eaten by the star, like some grotesque cosmic performance of Kronos devouring his children.

In G238-44's atmosphere, astronomers have detected traces of elements that suggest the dead star has recently accreted material that is metallic and rocky, like inner Solar System asteroids, as well as material that is icy, like the frozen bodies that can be found in the outer Solar System's Kuiper Belt.

And then there's necroplanetology – the study of the remains of white dwarf exoplanets based on traces of the heavy elements they contained "polluting" white dwarf atmospheres.

Because white dwarfs are so dense (think of something the mass of the Sun, packed into a sphere the size of Earth), heavy elements should sink out of view pretty rapidly, which means any heavy element pollution in a white dwarf atmosphere needs to have been deposited recently.

"The abundances of the elements we see on this white dwarf appear to have come from both a rocky parent body and a volatile-rich parent body – the first example we've found among studies of hundreds of white dwarfs."

Although the inner Solar System objects might be vaporized by the expanding white dwarfs, the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter could survive, to be perturbed by a destabilized Jupiter and rain onto the dead star