The Jeddah Astronomical Society confirmed that a new study found that planetary debris containing moon-sized objects may indicate the presence of planet A rocky potential within the habitable zone around a dead star.
The star is a white dwarf called WD1054-226, which is a cold remnant of a star that has exhausted all fuel, and if that planet is confirmed outside our solar system, it will be an advance for white dwarf star science, as only one planet has previously been discovered orbiting a white dwarf, but it is a gas giant planet Similar to Jupiter, not near the habitable zone “a region usually defined as the proper groove for liquid water on the surface of a rocky planet”.
In general, astronomers added, confirming the existence of the planet with current technology will not be easy, as it is done by comparing computer models by making more observations of the star and the debris around it.
The star WD1054–226, only 117 light-years from Earth, is close enough to be directly observed by many telescopes.
Researchers realized that a planet might orbit a white dwarf due to the apparent dips in the star’s light detected by the 3.5-meter European Southern Observatory telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. These changes in brightness.
The data suggest that the dips in WD1054–226’s brightness correspond to 65 “evenly spaced” planetary debris clouds orbiting the star every 25 hours. The uniform distribution of debris in space suggests that a rocky planet (similar to the size of Earth) might keep everything in place.
White dwarfs are important because they provide an overview of what will happen in our solar system when the sun runs out of hydrogen in regarding five billion years. Before collapsing into a white dwarf, stars go through a so-called red giant phase where they expand from 100 to 1,000 times and burn the planets closest to them.
When the Sun turns into a red giant, life on Earth will no longer be possible, and temporarily the habitable zone will move toward the outer part of our solar system, before shrinking once more to include only the closest surroundings of the cool white dwarf.
A potential planet around the star WD1054–26 is aptly located in the habitable zone, orbiting at a distance of 2.5 million km from the star, regarding 28 times closer than Mercury to the Sun.
What’s even more interesting is that all the debris and the potential planet may have formed or somehow arrived in the region following the red giant’s collapse into the white dwarf, because the material is so close that it was devoured by the red giant.
It is expected that the planet around the white dwarf was swept away during the giant star phase of its life, so any planet that might contain water and thus life would be a recent evolution for at least two billion years, including at least one billion years into the future.
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