Scientists assume it’s possible that there are planets that can survive when the sun is destroyed.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — Scientists announce the first discovery of an orbiting planet star dwarfs (dead stars). The findings suggest that some parts of the world in our solar system will likely survive the sun’s cataclysmic demise some five billion years from now.
The newly discovered planet is a gas giant about 40 percent larger than Jupiter, and its parent star, orbiting at breakneck speed near the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Planets orbiting around white dwarf star The distant object was accidentally discovered during a gravitational microlensing event in 2010. However, for a long time, astronomers had no idea what they were looking at.
Research on the discovery of the first planet orbiting a dwarf star has been published in the journal Nature on October 13, 2021.
Gravitational microlensing occurs when two stars at different distances from Earth are temporarily aligned from our perspective. The gravity of the foreground star acts like a lens and magnifies the light from the background star. If a planet orbits a foreground star, the magnified light will bend briefly as the planet rotates rapidly in front of the star.
“To detect an object through gravitational microlensing, you just depend on the mass of the object; you don’t need the light coming from it. We can see that there is an object about half the mass of the sun with a Jupiter-mass planet orbiting it,” said the professor of astrophysics at the University of Tasmania in Australia and director of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, to Space, reported on Saturday (16/10).
Beaulieu is also a co-author of a new paper detailing the discovery. At the time, scientists thought it was just another exoplanet. Beaulieu said the find was interesting but by no means unique.
However, astronomers wanted to learn more about the system and decided to study it with one of the WM Keck telescopes in Hawaii. To their surprise, they couldn’t see anything.
“Since the object has half the mass of the sun, the Keck telescope, one of the best telescopes of its kind, should be able to detect it. But it found nothing,” Beaulieu said.
The scientists concluded that the mysterious object surrounding the only orbiting planet must be a black hole or white dwarf, the faint remnant of a star that ran out of fuel at its core and collapsed into a superdense ball of cooling the size of Earth.
“When we look at the mass range, it’s typical of the white dwarf population we’re familiar with in our galaxy,” he continued.
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