New research has discovered a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a dead star. This unusual thing was found 6,500 light-years away, near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. This pairing was unexpected because the gas giant exoplanet with a mass similar to Jupiter's orbits a white dwarf.
White dwarfs are remnants of sun-like stars that swelled into red giants during stellar evolution. After a star loses its atmosphere, all that remains is a collapsed core, known as a white dwarf. This remnant, usually the size of Earth, has continued to cool for billions of years.
Finding an intact planet orbiting a white dwarf raises questions about how it survived the evolution of stars into white dwarfs. Because during the process, the red giant before becoming a white dwarf, burns hydrogen fuel and expands, eating any planet in its path.
By observing the system, the researchers were able to determine that the planet and star formed at the same time and that the planet survived the death of the star. The planet is about 2.8 AU from the star. The AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance between the Earth and the sun, or 92 million miles (148 million kilometers).
The findings of a new study, published in the journal Nature, suggest that planets can survive this extremely violent phase of stellar evolution, and support the theory that more than half of white dwarfs may have similar planets orbiting them. Previously, scientists believed gas giant planets would need to be further away to survive the death of stars like the sun.
The discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a dead star reveals what might happen in our solar system when the sun dies in about 5 billion years.
"This evidence confirms that planets orbiting large enough distances can continue to exist after the death of their star," Joshua Blackman, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at the University of Tasmania in Australia, said in a statement. "Given that this system is analogous to our own solar system, this suggests that Jupiter and Saturn may have survived the red giant phase of the Sun, when it ran out of nuclear fuel and self-destructed."
White dwarfs and the future of Earth
When the sun becomes a red giant billions of years from now, it will likely engulf Mercury and Venus — and possibly Earth.
"Earth's future may not be as bright as it is closer to the Sun," said David Bennett, study co-author and senior research scientist at the University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in a statement.
"If humans were to move to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn before the Sun fry the Earth during its red supergiant phase, we would still be in orbit around the Sun, although we wouldn't be able to rely on heat from the Sun as a white dwarf for very long."
Jupiter-like planets were previously discovered through a technique called microlensing, which is used to detect cold planets far from their stars. This same technique can be used to find small, faint white dwarfs. Microlensing occurs when a star near Earth briefly aligns with a star that is more distant. The gravity of the closer star acts like a magnifying lens and increases the light from the more distant star.
The researchers used the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, as well as its Near Infrared Camera, to observe white dwarfs and planets. White dwarfs are 60% the mass of our sun, and the planet is about 40% larger than Jupiter.
The high-resolution near-infrared images allowed the researchers to rule out the possibility that what orbited the exoplanet was a normal star or some other type of evolved star.
"We can also rule out the possibility of a neutron star or black hole host. This means that the planet is orbiting a dead star, a white dwarf," study co-author Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, chair of Warren Astrophysics at the University of Tasmania and research director of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris of France's National Center for Scientific Research, said in a statement. "This offers a glimpse into what our solar system would look like after the loss of Earth, perishing in the catastrophic destruction of our Sun."
More planets survive around white dwarfs
So far, only giant planets have been detected around white dwarfs, but that doesn't mean they are the only planets around this dead star.
"There should also be a smaller mass planet orbiting a white dwarf," Bennett wrote in an email. “Our microlensing survey detected a similar number of Jupiter and Neptune, but we were more sensitive to Jupiter. So, we've found that a Neptune-mass planet is about 10 times more common than Jupiter in a wider orbit that will persist in the late stages of the star. evolution. We hope that we will find planets of varying masses orbiting white dwarfs."
"We expected to find a planet with a mass range orbiting a white dwarf, but smaller rocky planets in close orbits are more likely to be torn apart during the red giant phase of their parent star's evolution," Blackman added.
The researchers will continue the search for surviving exoplanets orbiting dead stars in the future. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launched in 2026, "will conduct a much more sensitive micro-lens survey that will find more planets orbiting white dwarfs," Bennett said.
The telescope will directly image the giant planets and survey the planets orbiting the white dwarfs in our galaxy, giving scientists a better ratio of how many stars evolved and how many survived.
In recent years, other giant planets have orbited dead stars, including those slowly being eaten alive by its zombie star, as well as giant planets orbiting near white dwarfs.
"News about another planet being discovered circling a white dwarf is exciting, offering additional evidence that planets exist around dead stars after our paper last year reported on the first planets ever discovered," said Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University. Kaltenegger was not involved in the new study.
While this particular planet is unlikely to be viable for life, there has been a lot of research focused on the idea of looking for life on planets that can orbit white dwarfs.
“If a planet can survive the death of its star, can life too? The James Webb Space Telescope, which will be launching soon, can answer that question very well," Kaltenegger said. "If life could survive even on planets surrounding stellar corpses, it would make for an amazing future for our cosmos."
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November 27, 2021
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