Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2016

20 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2016 Spectro- graph (UVES) and X-shooter, both attached to the VLT, the team obtained detailed observations of T he r e - m a i n s of a fatal interac- tion between a dead star and its asteroid supper have been studied in detail for the first time by an international team of astronomers using the Very Large Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. This gives a glimpse of the far-future fate of the Solar System. Led by Christopher Manser, a PhD student at the University of War- wick in the United Kingdom, the team used data from ESO’s Very The glowing halo of a zombie star by ESO SPACE CHRONICLES Large Te l e s c ope (VLT) and other ob- servatories to study the shattered remains of an asteroid around a stellar remnant — a white dwarf called SDSS J1228+1040. Using several instruments, including the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle