Jupiter-Like Planet Survives Death of Its Star; How Did It Happen?

A giant Jupiter-like planet that survived its star's catastrophic demise has given scientists a glimpse into our solar system's distant future.

The planet, designated MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb, was initially discovered in 2010. Joshua Blackman of the University of Tasmania in Australia and his colleagues have verified that it orbits a white dwarf, a stellar remnant left when stars like the sun run out of fuel.

Astronomers reported the tantalizing glimpse of the exoplanet's escape in a study titled "A Jovian Analogue Orbiting a White Dwarf Star."

Astronomers Discover an Exoplanet That Endured Its Star's Death

When the planet and its star warped background starlight, astronomers noticed the system. A lucky Jupiter-sized world orbits a small stellar corpse-a faint white dwarf star approximately the size of Earth that was previously quite similar to the sun. As the star grew older, it expanded into a red giant before falling into a compact white dwarf. The said process could instantly kill planets around it.

MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb is a planet with a similar orbit to Jupiter. The finding provides a look into the future of our universe and raises the potential that life on "survivor" worlds may survive the deaths of their stars.

In an email to The New York Times, Blackman said the current solar system's destiny is likely similar to MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb.

Astronomers initially discovered the planet due to the gravitational field's light-warping effects, a process known as microlensing. Blackman and his colleagues decided it was orbiting a white dwarf that was too weak to detect directly after searching for years for its home star with the Keck II telescope in Hawaii.

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Last year, astronomers discovered another entire Jupiter-like planet, known as WD 1856 b, orbiting a white dwarf using a different approach. MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb, on the other hand, rolls its buried stellar shell thrice the distance between Earth and the sun, making it the first planet known to orbit a white dwarf in a Jupiter-like orbit. WD 1856b, on the other hand, orbits its star every 1.4 days. The planet that moved to its current location after the star's death. But the details of that voyage are yet unknown.

How The Planet Survived The Inferno

Although scientists believe planets can survive their host stars' violent demise, there aren't many examples of planets that have survived the tumult. National Geographic said the surviving exoplanet and white dwarf star transferred in front of a more remote background star in 2010. Scientists with the Microlensing Observations in the Astrophysics team noticed the relocation for the first time.

The pair's gravitational alignment magnified and distorted the distant starlight, resulting in a microlensing event, as astronomers call it. Microlensing has revealed the presence of around 90 worlds so far. These include some free-floating planets and renegade worlds that have broken away from their host stars and wander the galaxy alone.

The way the vast planet and white dwarf warped the background starlight disclosed numerous key features of the system, including its migration across the sky, the presence of a star and a planet, and the planet's enormous orbit. Astronomers were also able to compute the relative masses of the two objects thanks to the data. Astronomers were interested in MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb. They'd have to wait several years to get a closer look, though.

Bennett and his colleagues searched for the star in 2015 using the enormous Keck-II telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. They knew how far the system had moved in those five years. So they pointed Keck at the region, gazed into the darkness, and saw nothing that looked like the star they were searching for. They only noted a different star moving in the other way.

The researchers recreated the observations in 2016 and 2018 but came up empty both times. However, based on the warped starlight, they realized the system had to exist. Bennett and his colleagues discovered they couldn't find anything because whatever they were looking for was so faint that even Keck couldn't see it.

The researchers determined that the system contained a Jupiter-sized globe and a white dwarf star with about half the sun's mass after conducting a few additional simulations. The planet's orbit takes it at least 2.8 times further away from its star than Earth orbits the sun, putting it in the same trajectory as the asteroid belt in our solar system.