00:00In a nearby corner of our galactic neighborhood, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope just caught
00:05a white dwarf star having a cosmic snack.
00:09This burned-out star is about half the mass of our Sun, crammed into a body the size of
00:14Earth, and it's tearing apart something a lot like Pluto.
00:18Researchers estimate the doomed object was roughly Pluto-sized, ripped from its star
00:23system's version of the Kuiper Belt, and devoured piece by piece.
00:28The Kuiper Belt is a vast ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune, home to Pluto and many other
00:34frozen worlds.
00:36Hubble's ultraviolet vision revealed fragments packed with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and
00:41water ice as they fell into the star.
00:45These materials should have boiled away long before reaching the star's scorching surface,
00:49yet they survived.
00:52Billions of years from now, when our Sun becomes a white dwarf, the same fate may await icy worlds
00:57in our own Kuiper Belt.
00:59Thanks to Hubble, we are not only witnessing a star's strange appetite, but glimpsing our
01:04own solar system's possible future.
01:06NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, still feeding us discoveries.
01:27NASA's Hubble Space Telescope
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