Giant Planet Found Orbiting Dead StarNASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Pexels
A giant planet has been found orbiting a dead star for the first time.
The planet is said to be around the same size as Jupiter, and is an exoplanet, meaning it’s located outside of our solar system. The giant planet, known as WD 1586 b, has been closely orbiting the dead star, also known as a white dwarf, every 34 hours.
White dwarfs are created after a sun-like star evolves and swells up to a red giant. The expanding star burns through its hydrogen supplies and consumes any planets in its path. Once the star expands enough it loses any atmosphere it had, and the collapsed core – the white dwarf – continues to cool for billions of year afterwards. Billions of years from now, our sun will become a red giant, and is predicted to consume Mercury and Venus, and maybe even Earth.
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This particular dying star is located 80 light-years from Earth in the Draco constellation.
Information about the exoplanet and star was released in a study published on Nature yesterday, September 16. The study begged the question of how a fully intact planet could closely orbit a white dwarf and how it got there.
Researchers believe the planet was initially much further away from the star and moved closer once the star evolved.
Simulations created by researchers suggest the planet moved closer to the star once it became a white dwarf. In regards to how it got so close, the study suggested that larger planets like this one may be able to survive the violent evolution of a star – the expanding and burning – and then orbit it as a close proximity afterwards.
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Ian Crossfield, study coauthor and assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, told CNN:
We think this star died and became a white dwarf roughly six billion years ago – so long ago that the Sun, Earth, and solar system hadn’t even been formed yet. Though the star is just a fading ember (only one-ten-thousandth as bright as our Sun) this planet is now likely on a stable orbit, so it should be there for us to study and learn more about it for many years to come.
This isn’t the only big science news to surface this week. On Monday, September 14, signs of microbial alien life were detected on Venus after scientists discovered rare molecules in clouds above the planet’s surface.
Scientists had speculated that life could survive in Venus’s atmosphere, as the distant planet’s atmosphere has a more moderate climate than its surface, which is thought to be over 400°C.
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