A group of scientists from California using the Spitzer Space Telescope have examined the debris rings around six different white dwarfs, one of which is depicted above in this artist's rendering. What they found was that a lot of these shattered rocks were low in carbon but high in other minerals common to rocky planets in our solar system. Planets in our system are also low in carbon.

The researchers announced their findings at this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, CA. According to Centauri Dreams:

When a star like our Sun reaches the end of its life and becomes a red giant, it consumes any inner planets and perturbs the orbits of the surviving planets and asteroids. A white dwarf is the end result of this stellar expansion and subsequent collapse. Objects wrenched out of their former orbits should, like the asteroids in question, occasionally drift close enough to the star to be pulled apart by its gravity. Such a star, showing the excess infrared signature of a circumstellar disk that is likely caused by the tidal disruption of asteroids, is called a ‘polluted’ white dwarf.

And that's what we're seeing here.

SOURCE: Astronomical Journal.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Actually, it's really a relatively quiet book outside of the major publishers, with Chopper Zombie - which we've previously written about here - the only new indie book of interest coming out. The Chopper in question was on show at San Diego, freaking small children out while simultaneously getting gearheads excited:

If your tastes run towards the less gory and more whimsical, then perhaps you should check out Dark Horse's Robots & Donuts, a collection of fantasy artist Eric Joyner's paintings of toy robots from the early 20th century in unexpected settings. Equally whimsical is Marvel's Skrulls Vs. Power Pack, which brings Marvel's second-favorite family of superheroes face to face with everyone's favorite Secret Invaders.

Skipping over to DC for a moment, they have a couple of big books this week: Justice Society of America Annual has Geoff Johns exploring the multiverse by returning Power Girl to Earth-2 finally, while Keith Giffen explores the afterlife in the first issue of Reign In Hell. Maybe more appropriately for the io9 audience, Wildstorm's new dystopic reality begins in the first issue of the re-re-relaunched Wildcats; no Grant Morrison or Jim Lee this time around, but there is a completely-fucked world for our heroes to deal with.

Image sidesteps any notion of continuity with their second Popgun anthology by an amazing selection of creators including James Kochalka, Dan Hipp and Paul Pope, and it's probably the pick of the week. Nonetheless, Marvel has two more books that I must mention: Fantastic Four: True Story sees Doctor Who writer and io9 favorite Paul Cornell take on Marvel's first-family of superheroes (admit it; you thought I'd leave you hanging on that one), while True Believers may be the ideal io9 comic book: A team of superpowered bloggers on a mission to expose the seedy underbelly of the Marvel Universe in a first issue that features a superpowered all-female fight club watched over by old men dressed up as the Hulk, Spider-Man and other familiar faces? With one of our heroes undercover as a hooker who complains that she won't give a john a "crusty bunker"? Who could resist? It's not perfect, of course - Paul Gulacy draws it, for one thing - but it's the kind of zeitgeist-shagging over-written schlock that we don't see enough of these days, and therefore highly recommended.

By now you know the drill: You can find the whole list of this week's releases here, and look for your local comic book store here. Just ask them for the one about the crusty bunkers.

Released to give the fact-obsessed yet comic-phobic fans of The Dark Knight their batfacts fix, Greenberger's newly updated and rewritten collection of Batman trivia is both exhaustive and exhausting, tracing multiple fictional histories of almost everyone who's ever had any contact with Bruce Wayne whatsoever (It even explains the origins of "Zur-Eh-Arrh," the phrase at the center of the current Batman RIP storyline, but be warned; it's probably not what you expect) alongside a wealth of art from various Batman comics of the last 69 years. It's very much a book to dip in and out of rather than sit down and read, although you'll find yourself getting sucked in to the differences between Earth-1, Earth-2, Post-Crisis and New Earth versions of history (Earth-2's Batman was probably the luckiest, apart from that whole death thing). Greenberger - a former editor for not only DC Comics, but Marvel and the Weekly World News - manages to condense everything into a format that's not only easy to understand, but easy to read, as well; no mean feat when explaining just how Jason Todd managed to be blown up and murdered until Superboy Prime punched the walls of reality.

If the book has a flaw, it's that it's almost too much information; Greenberger has talked about the difficulties of creating entries for minor characters from the 50s, and you can understand why; while every character may be someone's favorite, that doesn't mean that all of them have to be bulking up an already impressive project like this one.

That aside, it's a strange book to recommend; curiously addictive, yet at the same time, utterly unnecessary, it's the kind of book that you should tell people not to get you for your birthday, but secretly covet at the same time. How else, after all, can you easily find out the entire history of Ted Grant?

The Essential Batman Encyclopedia [Random House]

Most of the 280 or so exoplanets discovered so far have been searing gas giants that orbit their stars closer than Mercury is to the Sun. But GJ 436c is the latest in a growing class of rocky exoplanets called 'super-Earths' that are getting smaller by the day, thanks to a new method planet-hunting astronomers are using to measure stars' gravitational wobble:

Ignasi Ribas, lead author of the study from the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), says: "After final confirmation, the new exoplanet will be the smallest found to date. It is the first one to be identified from the perturbations exerted on another planet of the system. Because of this, the study opens a new path that should lead to the discovery of even smaller planets in the near future, with the goal of eventually finding worlds more and more similar to the Earth."

Photo: Wikipedia