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An illustration shows a Jupiter like world orbiting a dead whire dwarf star.
In an unusual discovery, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers spotted two gas giant exoplanets — not unlike the ones found in our solar system — orbiting the remains of their respective white dwarf star parents. They are considered Unusual, because of the ultimate forces involved.
White dwarfs are made after a red huge expands and exhausts its nuclear fuel, shedding its outer layers to make a planetary nebula, a process that’s been observed to obliterate nearby planets. The result? An extremely dense core, with a mass of roughly the Sun’s, packed into the space of a single Earth.
But could planets orbiting such a star actually survive that kind of ordeal? As Per the latest researches detailed in a new paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, first spotted by Science Alert: Yes, it’s possible.
“If confirmed, these would be the very first directly imaged planets that are similar in both age and separation to the giant planets in our own solar system, and they would display that widely separated giant planets like Jupiter survive stellar evolution,” the international team of astronomers writes.
Deadly Orbit
Credit goes to the James Webb telescope’s unconventional ability to detect super dim and extremely far away objects were the scientists able to spot the mysterious and strange pair of exoplanets.
The team led by Susan Mullally of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) trained the space telescope on a pair of white dwarfs roughly 34 and 53 light-years away from Earth respectively, and detected what they believe to be two gas giant exoplanets.
The team estimates them to be anywhere from one to seven times the mass of Jupiter. Roughly speaking, their orbits are the equivalent of the distance between Saturn and the Sun and Neptune and the Sun, respectively.
In other words, at those distances, the findings suggest gas giants could survive their hot stars collapsing and converting into a white dwarf.
But it’s still far ahead of time to verify such a hypothesis. As Science Alert specify, we’ve only discovered a handful of white dwarfs to date. However, we’ve observed closely orbiting planets being absorbed by their extremely dense remains.
“Future spectroscopy and multi-band imaging of these systems may be possible with JWST, which would upgrade the observational constraints on the physics and variety of cool giant planet models,” the researchers conclude in their paper.
