Overview

• Ultraviolet data from Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph reveal unusually high nitrogen in the star's atmosphere, a composition incompatible with typical comets.
• Researchers infer the material comes from fragments of a frozen world akin to Pluto's nitrogen‑rich ices rather than from rocky bodies previously seen falling onto white dwarfs.
• The accretion has persisted for at least 13 years at an extreme rate likened to an adult blue whale's mass per second.
• The white dwarf lies about 255 light‑years away, is the compact remnant of a star roughly 50% more massive than the Sun, and is Earth‑sized yet about 190,000 times Earth's mass.
• The peer‑reviewed study, published this month in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, underscores how icy bodies could deliver water and other volatiles relevant to habitability.