Astronomers have found a rare double ring of planetary debris circling a dead star, a structure that may resemble the distant future of our own Solar System. The observations, made with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile's Atacama Desert, are reported by Mirage News and were published this week in Nature Astronomy.
The star at the centre of the system is J1328−1450, a white dwarf — the dense, burnt-out core left when a star like our Sun exhausts its fuel. What surrounds it differs from every other debris disc known around such stars: two concentric rings of vaporised planetary rubble, held apart by a clear gap.
Why it matters
When Sun-like stars reach the end of their lives, they swell and cast off their outer layers, swallowing and destroying planets that orbit too close. Rocky survivors can shatter into debris that settles around the dead star. Until now, every known debris disc around a white dwarf has shown the same observational signature — a single flat, rotating disc.
The J1328−1450 system breaks that pattern entirely, according to Mirage News. Its two rings appear unusually stable and stay separated, a configuration the research team says is likely maintained by two surviving planetary bodies on separate orbits.
"We have known for some time that planets may survive beyond the transformation of their central star, but this is the first example of a complex system with a double debris disc and potentially two surviving planetesimals," said Nicola Gentile Fusillo, an astronomer at the Università degli Studi di Trieste in Italy and lead author of the study, in comments carried by Mirage News.
Because our Sun is expected to become a white dwarf in the far future — a process that may destroy Earth — the system offers a preview of how planetary systems like ours might end.
Two survivors and two different rings
The team estimates the inner ring is shaped by a body a few kilometres across, roughly the size of a typical asteroid. The outer ring's companion could be as large as Pluto, or possibly as large as our Moon.
"The structure we see in this system is particularly intriguing because the two gaseous rings are remarkably stable and remain separated by a gap," said co-author Felipe Lagos-Vilches, an astronomer at the University of Warwick in the UK and at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Chile, according to Mirage News.
The data also show the rings are not made of identical material. Calcium, oxygen, magnesium and iron appear in the disc, a mix similar to rocky planetary material in our own Solar System. But the inner ring is rich in magnesium gas while the outer ring is largely stripped of it.
That difference suggests the planetesimals feeding the two rings came from two planets with distinct compositions. Another possibility, the researchers note, is that they are pieces of different parts of a single body — such as a planet's crust and its core.
"The system is a rare glimpse of the violent, chaotic process by which a planetary system meets its end, and it hints that dead stars can have disc structures far more complex than previously realised," Gentile Fusillo said, per Mirage News. He is also affiliated with the INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Trieste.
The observations were made with the X-Shooter instrument on the VLT. The study's other authors are Boris T. Gänsicke of the University of Warwick, Christopher J. Manser of Imperial College London, and Detlev Koester of the University of Kiel in Germany.
"The system therefore offers a remarkable glimpse of what the future of planetary systems, including systems like our own, might look like," Lagos-Vilches concluded.
The findings are detailed in a paper published in Nature Astronomy (doi: 10.1038/s41550-026-03004-3). Further study of J1328−1450 and similar white dwarfs will show whether double discs are a rare exception or a more common stage in the death of planetary systems.
