Artist's impression of a white dwarf, G29-38, accreting planetary material from a circumstellar debris disk. When the planetary material hits the white dwarf surface, a plasma is formed and cools via detectable X-ray emission....

The white dwarf WD1054-226 exhibits a constant stream of transits by debris and or dust in orbit about it, with an underlying period of 25.02 hours. Astronomers believe that the material orbits within the star's habitable zone, where the temperature ...

... ollision caused the two bodies to merge into a giant, donut-shaped cloud of hat gas and dust called a synestia (background). Debris from the impact is seen in the foreground. ...

The white dwarf shown in the illustration is one of several that an international team of astronomers has been studying. Called ZTF J0923+4236, the star exhibits a series of dips in its brightness. The team, led by Amornrat Aungwerojwit from Naresuan...

Astronomers from the University of Warwick, UK, have observed a pair of old white dwarf stars, both of which have had their atmospheres polluted by infalling planetary material. The two stars do not orbit each others and are not related. One is a coo...

Artwork of the young Earth-Moon system. The Earth had recently formed when it was struck by a protoplanet – called Theia – roughly three times the size of Mars. Debris from the impact went into orbit, while the cores of the two planets merged. Wi...

Artwork showing two of the potential dangers of low-Earth orbit. Since the late 1950s, the amount of junk in orbit around the Earth has escalated dramatically. The debris includes pieces of old spacecraft and objects accidentally dropped by astronaut...

... rial planets grow their mass through collisions of planetary embryos, and that these giant impacts should produce observable debris. The ALMA (Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array) observations of CO strongly suggest the presence of these pla ...