Faraway object being destroyed by real-life 'Death Star'

Source: AP

By MARCIA DUNN

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A white dwarf star in the Constellation Virgo turns out to be a "death star" worthy of "Star Wars."

Astronomers announced Wednesday that they have discovered a rocky object coming apart in a death spiral around this distant star. They used NASA's exoplanet-hunting Kepler spacecraft to make the discovery, then followed up with ground observations.

"This is something no human has seen before," said Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the lead author.

"We're watching a solar system get destroyed," he said in a statement.

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This artist's rendering provided by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows an asteroid slowly disintegrating as it orbits a white dwarf star. On Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2015, researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced they have discovered a rocky object coming apart in a death spiral around a white dwarf star in the Constellation Virgo. They used NASA's Kepler spacecraft to make the discovery, then followed up with ground observations. (Mark A. Garlick/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics via AP)

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