A team of astronomers detailed how an asteroid was torn apart to form a ring of debris after the process was captured for the first time.

"The diameter of the gap inside of the debris ring is 700,000 kilometers, approximately half the size of the Sun and the same space could fit both Saturn and its rings, which are only around 270,000 km across," study lead author Christopher Manser, of the University of Warwick's Astrophysics Group, said in a press release. "At the same time, the white dwarf is seven times smaller than Saturn but weighs 2500 times more."

Published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the new study was part of a research project analyzing white dwarf stars left behind by dead planetary systems. The star observed in the study, SDSS1228+1040, showed a debris ring similar to the one surround Saturn.

"We knew about these debris disks around white dwarfs for over twenty years, but have only now been able to obtain the first image of one of these disks," Manser said. "The image we get from the processed data shows us that these systems are truly disc-like, and reveal many structures that we cannot detect in a single snapshot. The image shows a spiral-like structure which we think is related to collisions between dust grains in the debris disc."

While it is certainly way off in the future, the new study could preview what would happen to our own solar system when the sun's fuel runs out.

"When we discovered this debris disk orbiting the white dwarf SDSS1228+1040 back in 2006, we thought we saw some signs of an asymmetric shape. However, we could not have imagined the exquisite details that are now visible in this image constructed from twelve years of data - it was definitely worth the wait," Manser's colleague, Boris Gänsicke, said in the release. "Over the past decade, we have learned that remnants of planetary systems around white dwarfs are ubiquitous, and over thirty debris disks have been found by now. While most of them are in a stable state, just like Saturn's rings, a handful are seen to change, and it is those systems that can tell us something about how these rings are formed."