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In a nearby corner of our
galactic neighborhood,

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope

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just caught a white dwarf star
having a cosmic snack.

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This burned-out star
is about

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half the mass of our Sun,
crammed into a body

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the size of Earth, and it’s

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tearing apart
something a lot like Pluto.

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Researchers estimate the doomed object

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was roughly Pluto-sized,

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ripped from its star system’s

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version of the Kuiper Belt,
and devoured piece by piece.

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The Kuiper Belt is a vast
ring of icy bodies beyond

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Neptune, home to Pluto
and many other frozen worlds.

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Hubble’s ultraviolet vision

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revealed fragments
packed with hydrogen, oxygen,

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nitrogen, and water ice
as they fell into the star.

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These materials
should have boiled away

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long before
reaching the star’s

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scorching surface, yet
they survived.

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Billions of years
from now,

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when our Sun becomes a white
dwarf, the same fate

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may await icy worlds
in our own Kuiper Belt. 

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Thanks to Hubble, we are
not only witnessing a star’s

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strange appetite,

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but glimpsing our own solar
system’s possible future.

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope…

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Still feeding us discoveries!

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“Follow us on social media @NASAHubble”

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NASA Meatball!