SPACE — The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has proven its ability to peer into the past by photographing various objects at very long distances. But a new breakthrough has made the sophisticated instrument act almost like a scientific crystal ball, gazing far into the solar system’s future.
The Webb Telescope has just detected two extrasolar planets or exoplanets, orbiting two different star corpses. Not only is the planet very similar to the solar system’s gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, but the white dwarf (dead star) also serves as an analogy for the fate of the sun. You could say, Webb’s findings show the worst possible future for our sun.
For your information, when the sun turns into a white dwarf, this change will most likely destroy the planets in the solar system, up to Jupiter. The lead author of this study, Susan Mullaly, said that to date very few planets have been discovered around white dwarf stars.
“What’s remarkable about these two (discovered) planet candidates is that they are more similar to planets in our outer solar system in terms of temperature, age, mass and orbital separation than any planet discovered before,” said astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute to Space.com.
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“This gives us the first opportunity to see what a planetary system looks like after its star dies,” added Susan.
Portrait of Our Future
These planets were observed directly by JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) as they orbited the white dwarfs WD 1202-232 and WD 2105-82. One of them is located at a distance of about 11.5 times the Earth-Sun distance, from its white dwarf parent. The other is farther from its parent star, about 34.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
Currently, the masses of both planets are still uncertain, but Susan and colleagues estimate their masses to be between 1 and 7 times the mass of Jupiter, the most massive planet in the solar system.
Around the next 5 billion years, the Sun is also predicted to run out of fuel for the nuclear fusion process in its core. When that time comes, the sun will swell into a red giant. However, nuclear fusion will continue in its outer layers. That causes our star’s outer layers to reach all the way to Mars, swallowing up Mercury, Venus, Earth, and perhaps the Red Planet itself.
Eventually, those outer layers will cool, leaving the star’s smoldering core behind, and it will become a white dwarf. It will be surrounded by a planetary nebula containing exhausted star material.
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However, this latest exoplanet detection provides a clue about what could happen to planets beyond Mars, namely the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, when the Sun dies.
Susan and her colleagues predict that the outer planets will drift outward, into wider orbits, after a star dies. So, we can turn back time on these two planets, assuming they have a similar orbital separation to Jupiter and Saturn.
2024-02-04 07:32:00
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