Scientists discover a mysterious solar system. It's nothing like ours.

An artist's conception of a rocky object disintegrating around a white dwarf star. Credit: CfA / Mark A. Garlick

We are aware that mystery abounds in space. The recent discovery of a solar system that is very different from our own cosmic home by scientists adds curiosity.

The white dwarf star, which is the surviving heated core of a dead star similar to the sun, was discovered by researchers to be almost 10 billion years old. It is located 90 light-years away and is surrounded by a cemetery of fragments of planets known as planetesimals. These objects' debris has been drawn in by the dim star. But this solar system is unique compared to our surroundings. Elements like lithium and potassium are abundant there. Importantly, there are no planets in our solar system with such a makeup.

"It is a complete mystery," Abbigail Elms, a PhD student at the University of Warwick who researches white dwarfs, told Mashable. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a science journal, published the research this week.

This solar system is old, as was already mentioned. That implies that the white dwarf (designated WDJ2147-4035) and the solar system that surrounded it developed and perished before the sun and Earth were even created. According to Elms, the fragments of former planets that have been discovered around WDJ2147-4035 are the oldest planetesimals that have ever been discovered around a white dwarf in our galaxy.

Using the Gaia space observatory, they found this white dwarf as well as another of a same age. This far-off spacecraft is mapping the stars and galaxies in the universe while it orbits the sun. Following the discovery of these white dwarfs, the researchers used an instrument known as the "X-Shooter," which is situated at a high altitude in Chile, to determine what elements are and are not present in the stars' atmospheres (X-Shooter is a type of profoundly valuable astronomical tool called a "spectrometer"). Lithium, potassium, and sodium were discovered to have accreted, or been drawn in by gravity and gathered around, the old star in WDJ2147-4035.

An artist's conception of chunks of planets (planetesimals) orbiting white dwarf stars. Credit: University Of Warwick / Mark Garlick

The researchers deduced (by running simulations of this solar system's evolution) that since white dwarfs are composed of hydrogen or helium, the other rare elements must have come from the planets' rocky remnants.