This is the first photo of a distant star completely destroying an asteroid
A tiny star about 450 light-years away has ripped apart and devoured an asteroid, then spread the leftover chunks into an eerie red ring.
Astronomers knew asteroid pieces and other debris could form discs around white dwarf stars like this one, but this is the first time they've actually photographed such a disc.
You can see the killer white dwarf star, called SDSS1228+1040, at the center of the illustration below. White dwarf stars form when medium-sized stars reach the end of their lives, shrink down, and become very dense.
The red rings around the star are made of gas produced when chunks of the asteroid crashed into one another. The gas is illuminated by ultraviolet light from the star, so it appears dark red:
The rings of debris look a lot like the planet Saturn, but this star is massive compared to Saturn.
"The diameter of the gap inside of the debris ring is 700,000 kilometres, approximately half the size of the Sun and the same space could fit both Saturn and its rings, which are only around 270,000 km across," Christopher Manser, an astronomer at the University of Warwick's Astrophysics Group, said in a press release.
"At the same time, the white dwarf is seven times smaller than Saturn but weighs 2,500 times more."
You can see just how much larger the star is compared to Saturn in the scaled image below:
Researchers captured the image by scanning the star and debris from many different angles. The process is called Doppler Tomography, and it's similar to a CT scan that a doctor might give a patient.
However, the disc rotates so slowly that it took astronomers 12 years to compile the full image using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.
Here's what the completed image looks like. The different colors show different speeds of asteroid pieces (red is faster, blue is slower):
Researchers think studying these debris discs might help us figure out the fate of our own solar system.
Once our sun dies, it could turn into a white dwarf star like this one, and remnants of our solar system - perhaps even the Earth - might get pummeled into a debris disc.