Written by Amira Shehata Sunday, February 4, 2024 06:00 PM Discover James Webb Telescope The astronaut made a rare discovery when he identified a possible rare direct orientation of two exoplanets orbiting two different dead stars. Not only do the planets strongly resemble the solar system’s gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, but their dead stars also serve as a counterpart to the Sun’s fate.
According to the “Space” website, very few planets have been discovered around dead stars, and what is exceptional about these two planet candidates is that they are more similar to the planets in our solar system in terms of temperature, age, mass, and orbital separation than any planets that have been discovered previously. .
“This provides our first opportunity to see what a planetary system looks like after its star dies,” said Susan Mulally, the research’s principal investigator and an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
The candidate planets were observed directly by the telescope’s mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) as they orbited their stars WD 1202-232 and WD 2105-82.
One of the exoplanet candidates is located at a distance from its host star, about 11.5 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, while the other candidate is located farther from its dead parent star, about 34.5 times the distance between our planet and our star.
Exoplanet discoveries point to what would happen to planets such as Mars, the gas giant Jupiter and Saturn, when the Sun dies.
