“This planet is roughly the size of Jupiter, but it also has a very short orbital period — a year on this planet is only 1.4 days, so it’s quickly whipping around its white dwarf star,” said Ian Crossfield, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at University of Kansas about the first-ever discovery of a planet, WD 1856 b, orbiting a white dwarf vestige of a star, like our Sun, that has ballooned into a red giant then collapsed back into a dense, dim core that’s often about the size of Earth.
Somehow Avoided Destruction
Oddly, the planet, which captured astronomers’ interest when they noticed a possible transiting object with NASA’s TESS Space Telescope survey, is much larger than what’s left of its star. The process usually devours orbiting planets — but not in the case of WD 1856 b, which appears somehow to have avoided destruction.
“This tells us white dwarfs can have planets, which is something we didn’t know before,” Crossfield said. “There are people who now are looking for transiting planets around white dwarfs that could be potentially habitable. It’d be a pretty weird system, and you’d have to think about how the planets actually survived all that time. But it’s a big universe! Now we at least know some kinds of planets can survive and be found there, so that gives greater support and greater interest in continuing the search for even smaller planets around these white dwarfs.”
Death of a Star May Not be the End for Life
“If rocky planets exist around white dwarfs, we could spot signs of life on them in the next few years,” said Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Carl Sagan Institute in a separate research study published in The Astrophysical Journal.
“When observing Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarfs, the James Webb Space Telescope can detect water and carbon dioxide within a matter of hours,” said Ryan MacDonald, a research associate at the Carl Sagan institute. “Two days of observing time with this powerful telescope would allow the discovery of biosignature gases, such as ozone and methane.”
“We know now that giant planets can exist around white dwarfs, and evidence stretches back over 100 years showing rocky material polluting light from white dwarfs. There are certainly small rocks in white dwarf systems,” MacDonald said. “It’s a logical leap to imagine a rocky planet like the Earth orbiting a white dwarf.”
“What if the death of the star is not the end for life?” she said. “Could life go on, even once our sun has died? Signs of life on planets orbiting white dwarfs would not only show the incredible tenacity of life, but perhaps also a glimpse into our future.”
TESS Points to ‘Something is There’
“TESS finds a planet by looking at a star, and it measures how bright the star is continuously for weeks,” he said. “If a planet is orbiting the star, and if the planet passes between you and the star, some of that star’s light is going to be blocked. Then the star will get brighter again as the planet passes — we call this the ‘transit’ of the planet. And so, TESS looks for transiting exoplanet satellites. It tells you that something is there — but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what it is because it could be another dim star passing in front instead of a planet.”
“The Last Light” –When ‘Iron Black Dwarfs’ Blow Up the Universe
Spitzer Data Puts Final Nail in the Coffin
“For this white dwarf object, it’s tough to measure the mass of it — so we knew how big it was, but not how heavy it was,” said Crossfield who confirm if WD 1856 b indeed was a planet orbiting the white dwarf by studying the object’s infrared emissions with NASA’s now-defunct Spitzer Space Telescope in the months leading up to the satellite telescope’s decommission. “This new object could have been a small star or a big planet. The way we could tell the difference was to look and see — is this thing emitting infrared light as well? If it’s a star, stars are generally hotter than planets and it should be glowing in the infrared. But if it’s just a planet, planets are generally colder than stars and so there should be a little or no infrared light. What our Spitzer data showed is there’s basically no infrared light at all. And the depths of these transits are identical between the TESS data, and our Spitzer datasets. That really put the final nail in the coffin that this thing is almost certainly a planet, rather than a star.”
WD 1856 b is located about 80 light years away in the northern constellation Draco. The team behind the paper believes the gaseous planet was pulled in by the white dwarf’s gravity long after the star had dwindled down from its red giant phase — otherwise the planet would have been obliterated in its current orbit.
“In around five billion years our Sun will become a white dwarf. There’s a lot of open questions about whether planets can survive the process of a star inflating up to become a red giant, swallowing up some of the inner planets, and then shrinking back down and just being left over as the white dwarf again. Can planets actually survive that — or is that impossible? And until now, there weren’t any known planets around white dwarfs.”
The Daily Galaxy, Sam Cabot via Cornell University and University of Kansas
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