Astronomers find a double debris disc around a dead star

Distance from Earth

1,600 light-years

The white dwarf WD J1328−1450 lies about 1,600 light-years from Earth. Once similar to the Sun, it is now an ultra-dense, cooled stellar core.

Observed with the Very Large Telescope in Chile, it is circled by two concentric rings of debris, where the roughly 20 other known discs around white dwarfs have one flat ring.

The inner ring extends about 100,000 to 240,000 km from the star, and the outer ring from 375,000 to more than 1.3 million km.

Researchers say two bodies feed the rings: one a few kilometres across, the other as big as Pluto or perhaps the Moon. In about 5 billion years, the Sun's outer planets and Kuiper belt objects could form a similar cloud of debris.