Illustration of a planet orbiting a white dwarf, the dim remnant of a star
NASA/JPL-Caltech
A planet has been found orbiting a dead star in a zone where it should have been incinerated when the star died. The discovery might give us a window into the future of our solar system.
When stars like our sun exhaust their fuel, they first expand to become a red giant, then collapse into a dense, Earth-sized remnant called a white dwarf.
