Astronomers spy an iron planet stripped of its crust around a burned-out star

In a glimpse of what may be in store for our own solar system, astronomers have discovered what appear to be the shattered remains of a planet orbiting a white dwarf, the burned-out ember of a star like our sun. If the team’s calculations are correct, the orbiting object may be the iron core of a small planet that had its outer layers ripped off by the white dwarf’s intense gravity. The white dwarf, known as SDSS J122859.93+104032.9, or SDSS J1228+1040 to its friends, is one of only a handful of white dwarfs with a surrounding disk of both gas and debris, and the team wanted to study minute-by-minute changes in the gas.

Source: www.sciencemag.org