We have just discovered a scorched planet that has survived its sun | MNN

Through the foggy glitter of a pale white dwarf star located at 410 light-years from Earth, astronomers have observed something extraordinary. A planet, gravitating around this dead star, apparently would have survived the cataclysmic implosion that cost the sun its life.

This is the second body discovered in orbit around a missing star, reports the Washington Post.

The planet has not managed to escape unscathed. it's a burnt world, completely stripped of its outer clothes. These layers now glide around him like debris around a shipwreck, alluding to his formerly rocky planetary glory. Only a metal core from the old world remains intact, but it remains intact – and it's impressive, given what this planet has had to endure.

This could be a disturbing glimpse of Earth's future, as our solar system should experience the same fate as this white dwarf, which has known about 5 billion years ago.

All stars too small to become supernova or collapse into a black hole, like our sun, will eventually run out of their hydrogen fuel and die. The stars do not come out of this deadly reel without fighting, though. When their fuel runs out, these stars balloon up to huge sizes, called red giants, which devour the orbits of neighboring planets. In our solar system, Mercury and Venus will be completely engulfed. Earth will also be charred.

With a little luck, however, the Earth's metallic core could also be spat out, like this distant planetoid.

After the red giant phase, our sun convulses and fades, ending up shriveling into a mass of the size of the planet that shines faintly, a shell of the once radiant star that was.

This is what happened to the white dwarf, known as SDSS J122859.93 + 104032.9, which survived its cold metal planetoid.

"We have this glimpse of our possible future," said Jessie Christiansen, astronomer at the NASA's Exoplanets Scientific Institute, who did not participate in the new study. "It's exciting, and you can imagine it happening here."

This unusual discovery was discovered with the help of the largest optical telescope in the world, the Gran Telescopio Canarias in Spain. The dead solar system was reported after noticing that its light signature was constantly disrupted by a flow of gas in orbit, which we now know as the debris that surrounded the surviving metal planet. The discovery by astronomers of the University of Warwick in England was published in the journal Science.

Because of this planet's proximity to its sun and the surprising fact that it survived the death of its sun, researchers assume that it must be incredibly dense, probably a solid ball of iron.

Scientists now want to find other worlds like this one in the hope of better understanding the fate of our own solar system. As it is common to see clouds of debris around white dwarfs, it is hoped that the galaxy will be filled with such sustaining worlds, which could improve the chances that our solar system will also survive the death of the sun.

"All of this suggests that nearly half of the white dwarfs have a planetary system that has survived their evolutions and that springs out of materials," said Christopher Manser, one of the astrophysicists of the study.

And if planetary systems can survive around their white dwarf stars, there is optimism about the possibility that life will experience a second genesis by surrounding them as well. We believe that life in our solar system can continue to live even after the death of the sun.

We have just discovered a scorched planet that has survived its sun

Astronomers at the University of Warwick have reported that they have detected a large fragment of an earlier planet orbiting a debris disk surrounding a dead star.