 planets which have perturbed the belt of comets. Another explanation could be that the companion star of the white dwarf disturbed the belt and caused objects from the belt to travel toward the white dwarf. The change in orbit could also have been caused by a combination of these two scenarios.
The Kuiper Belt in the Solar System, which extends outward from Neptune's orbit, is home to many dwarf planets, comets, and other small bodies left over from the formation of the Solar System. The new findings now provide observational evidence to support the idea that icy bodies are also present in other planetary systems and have survived throughout the history of the star's evolution.
 The white dwarf was first found in 1974 and is part of a wide binary system, with a companion star separated by 2000 times the distance that the Earth is from the Sun.
 The measurements of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, sulphur, iron and nickel and hydrogen come from the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS, installed at the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope . The W. M. Keck Telescopes provided the calcium, magnesium, and hydrogen.
 The team calculated that the accreted object originally resided about 300 astronomical units — 300 times the distance Earth-Sun — away from the white dwarf. This is seven times further out than the Kuiper-Belt objects in the Solar System.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.
The international team of astronomers in this study consists of S. Xu (ESO, Germany), B. Zuckerman (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, USA), P. Dufour (Institut de Recherche sur les Exoplanètes, Université de Montréal, Canada), E. D. Young (Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles), B. Klein (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, USA), M. Jura (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
Image credit: NASA, ESA and Z. Levy (STScI)
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