ESO's Very Large Telescope finds a double debris disc around a dead star

28 October 2026

Astronomers using the X-shooter instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope at Paranal, in Chile's Atacama Desert, have found a rare double disc of debris around the white dwarf J1328-1450. A white dwarf is the dead core left when a star like the Sun runs out of fuel. The two rings are separated by a clear gap and appear to be shaped by two surviving planetary bodies: the inner one perhaps a few kilometres across, the outer one possibly as large as Pluto or the Moon. The debris contains calcium, oxygen, magnesium and iron, and the two rings differ in composition. The study was published in Nature Astronomy. The lead author is Nicola Pietro Gentile Fusillo of the University of Trieste and INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Trieste; the team includes Felipe Lagos-Vilches of the University of Warwick and Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria in Chile.