Astronomers have spotted signs of an intact giant planet circling a superdense stellar corpse known as a white dwarf. The white dwarf called WD 1856, is part of a three-star system that lies about 80 light-years from Earth. The newly detected, Jupiter-size exoplanet candidate, is about seven times larger than the white dwarf and zips around it once every 34 hours.
The white dwarf creation process destroys nearby planets, and anything that later gets too close is usually torn apart by the star’s immense gravity. For a long time that after white dwarfs are born, distant small objects such as asteroids and comets can scatter inward towards these stars. They’re usually pulled apart by a white dwarf’s strong gravity and turn into a debris disk. The planets could scatter inward, too, but this appears to be the first time we’ve seen a planet that made the whole journey intact.
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