For the first time, astronomers observed a star destroying a smaller object in close proximity to it.

Published in the journal Nature, the new study details a white dwarf star dubbed WD 1145+017 surrounded by debris and dust from a rocky object that is no more. For their work, the researchers used data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, Mashable reported.

"This is something no human has seen before," study lead author Andrew Vanderburg, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a news release. "We're watching a solar system get destroyed."

The star's cumbersome name has led some to refer to WD 1145+017 as the "real-life" Death Star, the fictional star-destroying space station from the "Star Wars" films. But while such a sophisticated space station built to destroy worlds teeming with intelligent life is not feasible, the destruction of a smaller rocky object at the hands of a larger star is.

The star is about 570 light years from Earth and lies within the Virgo constellation.

"It would not be a nice place to be," Vanderburg told Mashable. "It would be very hot, and essentially, it would be hot enough to vaporize the rocks that you're standing on. You wouldn't last very long.

"This is a very hot star, much hotter than our own sun, and it looks very small even though you're very, very close to it. You would see probably dust clouds forming behind the planet in its orbit, and you might see the other fragments nearby it."