A planet the size of Mars races toward a planet like Earth, smashes into its crust and mantle, and ejects debris that conglomerates into a large moon. Sound familiar? It's what scientists think happened billions of years ago to Earth. But the same drama may have unfolded much more recently around a nearby star in the constellation Hercules.
Known as NLTT 43806, the star is a white dwarf—a dim, dense, and dying sun about the size of Earth—located roughly 50 light-years away. "It is unique among known white dwarfs," says Benjamin Zuckerman, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Its surface has a very high aluminum abundance and a relatively low iron abundance."
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