AI Helps Astronomers Find Stars ⁘Eating

Reference: Found here

Astronomers have recently discovered hundreds of white dwarf stars in our Milky Way galaxy that are ⁘polluted⁘ by planets they've consumed.

These stars are valuable for studying the insides of distant, destroyed planets, but they are notoriously difficult to find.

Thanks to a new artificial intelligence (AI) technique, scientists are now identifying these elusive stars much more quickly and accurately.

Our sun will one day become a white dwarf, but not for another 6 billion years. Sometimes, the planets orbiting a white dwarf get pulled in by the star's gravity, torn apart, and ⁘eaten⁘ by the star.

When this happens, the star's atmosphere becomes ⁘polluted⁘ with heavy metals from the planet's core.

⁘For polluted white dwarfs, the insides of the planets are literally seared onto the surface of the star for us to study,⁘ explained Malia Kao, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin and the lead author of a new study on the subject.

⁘These polluted white dwarfs give us the best way to understand what planets outside our solar system are made of.⁘

The evidence of heavy metals in their atmospheres is subtle and can only be detected within a short period of time. Traditionally, astronomers had to manually sift through large amounts of survey data to find these stars, a time-consuming and challenging task.