This week, astronomers glimps the dramatic death of a solar system, a likely end for ours as well.

So we could be seeing how our own solar system could be disassembled in the future.

And bacteria that break down methane and eat the very strange byproduct.

That is the major point. They're eating electricity, yes, current electricity.

Plus the effects of temperature on the economy.

This is the Nature podcast for October the 22nd, 2015.

I'm Kerry Smith.

And I'm Adam Levy.

Even here at the very start of the show, it's time to acknowledge that all good things have to come to an end, including, unfortunately, our solar system.

But we don't need to wait around to catch a glimpse of what might happen in a few billion years.

Astronomers scouring the sky of spider-dead star, a white dwarf,

that could tell us about the final stages of our own sun and its planets.

Planet spotter Andrew Vanderberg and his colleagues have seen fragments of rocky planet-like bodies orbiting the star.

But it's more sinister than that.

They're slowly being eaten by the white dwarf.

Andrew spoke to reporter Lizzie Gibney about what we can learn from this ghostly system.

The sun is powered by the fusion of hydrogen into helium,

essentially the same power source that goes into nuclear weapons,

hydrogen bombs.

When the sun runs out of hydrogen as nuclear fuel, it eventually starts to expand.

And as it does this, it starts burning different elements like helium, carbon, and oxygen.

And as it continues doing this, the sun gets bigger and bigger and puffier and puffier.

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