Dead planets can "emit" up to a billion years and they could tell astronomers what will happen once our sun is up.

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Astronomers plan a hunt for relics of dead planets for a long time.

They have come to find an important clue in this research: the cores of dead planets can "emit" radio waves for a billion years, according to a new study published by the Royal Astronomical Society.

The waves are caused by interactions between the nucleus of a dead planet and the magnetic field of its dead star, known as the white dwarf. When a star explodes, it often strips the surrounding planets of their atmospheres and outer layers, leaving only the metal core. This metal drives electricity, creating a circuit between the nucleus of the planet and the dead star that produces radiation in the form of radio waves.

Scientists have known for decades that these planetary remains can emit radio waves. But this is the first research to establish a lifetime for these emissions and it reveals that the signals last long enough for researchers on Earth to detect and study them.

Alexander Wolszczan and Dimitri Veras, the scientists who made this discovery, then want to lead large telescopes to white dwarf stars to listen to radio broadcasts of undiscovered dead planets.

"Nobody had yet found the nucleus of a major planet, nor a major planet solely through the surveillance of magnetic signatures, nor a major planet around a white dwarf," Wolszczan said in a statement. A press release. "Therefore, a discovery here would represent" firsts "in three different meanings for planetary systems."

Emissions of dead planets

Wolszczan, a professor of astronomy at Penn State University, used radio waves to detect the first confirmed planet outside our solar system in the 1990s.

For the recent study, he wanted to determine how long radio broadcasts from dead planet cores could last. He therefore created with Veras computer simulations of all the magnetic fields and electrical conductivities observed in white dwarf stars.

Their findings suggest that dead planets' metal cores can emit radio waves for over 100 million years, and sometimes up to a billion years.

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Stars die because they end up burning their reserves of hydrogen and helium. This fuel creates an internal pressure that maintains the size and shape of the star, but once there is nothing left to burn, the star succumbs to gravity. Its nucleus contracts, sending a wave of energy that pushes its outer layers to the outside. As the star loses mass, its gravity weakens until it explodes and expels its outer layers into space.

The hot and dense core of the star is left behind, it is the phase at which he becomes a white dwarf.

The blast destroys nearby planets, blowing up many people to dust and tearing others apart. At most, the inner core of a planet will remain in orbit around its dead star.

"For a nucleus to have reached this stage, it would have been violently stripped of its atmosphere and cloak at one point and then thrown at the white dwarf," Veras said in a press release.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

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Our sun will die too

In about 5 billion years, our sun will burn in its hydrogen nucleus and begin the process of death, which will last a billion years, during which it will engulf the Earth before disappearing.

Thus, finding and studying the remnants of dead planets from the past could help scientists better understand the fate of our planet.

"Such a core could also provide insight into our own distant future and how the solar system will eventually evolve," said Veras.

The researchers plan to use the results of their work to ask for observation time in ground-based telescopes such as Arecibo in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. They have already identified the best white dwarf stars to study.

Ho New / Reuters / NRAO / AUI-Handout / Feature / Quiet Space

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"Given the existing evidence of the presence of planetary debris around a lot of them, we think our chances of interesting discoveries are pretty good," said Wolszczan.

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