University of Warwick astrophysicists have pinpointed four white dwarfs surrounded by dust from shattered planetary bodies which once bore striking similarities to the composition of Earth.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope for the biggest survey to date of the chemical composition of the atmospheres of white dwarf stars, the researchers found that the most frequently occurring elements in the dust around these four white dwarfs were oxygen, magnesium, iron and silicon -- the four elements that make up roughly 93 per cent of Earth.
However an even more significant observation was that this material also contained an extremely low proportion of carbon, which matched very closely that of Earth and the other rocky planets orbiting closest to our own Sun.
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