The giant planet Jupiter that survived the death of its star

WD 1856 b is the only confirmed case of a planet that survived the death of a Sun-like star. It is a small planet of Jupiter orbiting a white star – the burnt-out remnant of a Sun-like star. Now, a team of astronomers has used the James Webb Space Telescope to take a closer look at Earth for the first time, and their findings make an already strange system even stranger.

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WD 1856 b was discovered by accident. Astronomers pointed the TESS telescope at a sample of about 2,000 white dwarfs in 2020. These stars are the remnants of a Sun-like star that has already passed through the red phase, leaving behind a small body of the Earth that is mainly composed of elements such as air and gas. The TESS team was looking for small objects such as comets or asteroids that could pass through the faces of these dead stars.

What they found in the WD 1856 system was a gas giant. “When they looked at it, they said, well, that’s amazing,” said Christopher O’Connor, a physicist at Cornell University and co-author of a recent Nature study on WD 1856 b.

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