Astronomers have discovered strange types of rocks in the remains of planets torn apart by dying host stars.
Scientists have studied 23 white dwarfs - smalldense remains of dead stars of low and medium mass. They were all within 650 light years of the Sun. As these stars died, turning into white dwarfs, they tore apart the exoplanets that orbited them. Their traces remained in space near dead stars.
Scientists have studied them:They analyzed the light from the white dwarfs and then calculated the most likely composition of the minerals that could form the destroyed planets. As a result, astronomers discovered that only one of the white dwarfs contained the remains of exoplanets with a geological structure similar to Earth. Among the remaining dead stars, researchers found the remains of exoplanets, whose composition included unique rocks. Scientists have not seen them either on Earth or on other planets of the solar system.
The stones were so different from those known to science,that researchers even had to come up with new names to classify them, such as “quartz pyroxenites” and “periclase dunites.” Scientists plan to conduct new experiments to fully understand the mineralogy of the new compounds. The study authors note that their work contradicts previous assumptions that exoplanets are mostly similar to those we see in the solar system.
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