For the first time, astronomers have discovered evidence for a giant planet orbiting a tiny, dead white dwarf star. And, surprisingly, the Neptune-sized planet is more than four times the diameter of the Earth-sized star it orbits.
"This star has a planet that we can't see directly," study author Boris Gänsicke from the University of Warwick said in a press release. "But because the star is so hot, it is evaporating the planet, and we detect the atmosphere it is losing." In fact, the searing star is sending a stream of vaporized material away from the planet at a rate of some 260 million tons per day.
The new discovery serves as the first evidence of a gargantuan planet surviving a star's transition to a white dwarf. It suggests that evaporating planets around dead stars may be somewhat common throughout the universe. And because our sun, like most stars, will also eventually evolve into a white dwarf, the find could even shed light on the fate of our solar system.
