The white dwarf (a cooling stellar remnant) WD 1532+129 takes 289 days to complete one rotation — like Earth spinning once a year. At its magnetic poles, astronomers spotted concentrations of iron and other heavy elements. These metals are the remains of planets the star once swallowed.
Its magnetic field, of the white dwarf, acts like a funnel: when it pulls in debris from exoplanets, the field channels material not evenly but toward the poles. There, metals settle and form scars. In ordinary stars, material gets mixed up. Such traces quickly fade. Here, the magnetic field holds the metals. The scars live for billions of years.
The finding helps explain how white dwarfs "eat" their planets. Magnetic scars tell the story of destroyed worlds and force a rethink of stellar evolution models. The slow spin hints that the progenitor star might also have been magnetic. Even 4 billion years after cooling, the star still holds memories of its dead planets.
WD 1532+129's rotation period is almost like Venus's: 289 days vs. 243. But Venus is a planet, while this white dwarf is a star the size of Earth with the mass of the Sun.