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Evidence has been found of a planet circling the smouldering remains of a dead star in a tight orbit. The discovery raises the question of how the planet survived the star’s death throes — and whether other planets also orbit the remains.
In the past few decades, the number of planets discovered beyond our Solar System has increased rapidly, and current estimates are that around one-third of all Sun-like stars host planetary systems1. Given that the Milky Way contains around ten billion Sun-like stars, there are likely to be billions of planets in our Galaxy. All of these planet-hosting stars will eventually die, leaving behind burnt-out remnants known as white dwarfs. What becomes of the stars’ planetary systems when this happens is unclear, but in some cases it is thought that planets will survive and remain in orbit around the white dwarf2. Writing in Nature, Vanderburg et al.3 report the discovery of a planet that passes in front of (transits) the white dwarf WD 1856+534 every 1.4 days. Their work not only proves that planets can indeed survive the death of their star, but might offer us a glimpse of the far future of our own Solar System.
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Nature585, 354-355 (2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02555-3
Updates & Corrections
Correction 25 September 2020: Owing to an editorial error, an earlier version of this article attributed the Kepler mission to the European Space Agency, rather than to NASA.
References
Zhu, W., Petrovich, C., Wu, Y., Dong, S. & Xie, J. Astrophys. J.860, 101 (2018).