James Webb Telescope spots planet orbiting dead star — a preview of our solar system's fate

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Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe an oddball gas giant exoplanet orbiting a dead star, a white dwarf, located some 80 light-years away. This "life after death" system gives scientists a portentous vision of what the solar system may look like in around 6 billion years after the sun has exhausted the hydrogen in its core, shed its outer layers, and left behind a smoldering white dwarf stellar remnant.

Prior to the final stages of that transformation, our star will have become a red giant , swelling out to many times its original radius, swallowing the inner rocky planets including Earth but leaving the outer planets  — although changing them irrevocably. Reflecting this, the white dwarf at the heart of this research is orbited by a Jupiter-sized exoplanet, designated WD 1856 b .

As WD 1856 b orbits its dead parent star, it crosses or "transits" the face of this white dwarf, known as WD 1856+534. By observing these transits with the JWST, the team was able to measure the mass and temperature of this Jupiter-like planet while also observing the composition of its atmosphere. To their surprise, they found WD 1856 b is hotter than expected. They also discovered how this planet came to have such an unusually tight orbit around its host white dwarf star.

"We're used to looking back in time when we use telescopes, but this is the first time we have been able to look forward to what might happen to the outer planets around the remnant of a sun-like star; it's like using a time machine to peer into the distant future of our solar system," team leader Ryan MacDonald from the University of St Andrews in Scotland said in a statement . "This is just the beginning of our exploration of planets orbiting dead stars with Webb, and the search for further planets orbiting white dwarfs is ongoing.

"Our results show that stellar death is not the end  — some planets experience a vibrant and lively future after the death of their star."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (July) in the journal Nature.

Survivor planet is a real oddball

The gas giant WD 1856 b was first discovered in 2020 by NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and the Spitzer Space Telescope. TESS detects exoplanets using the tiny dips in starlight they cause as they transit their host stars, blocking starlight.

This was the first intact planet ever discovered closely orbiting a white dwarf. What immediately stood out about WD 1856 b was how close its orbit is to its white dwarf host. The orbit is around 2% the size of Earth's orbit around the sun and takes just 1.4 Earth days to complete.

"The planet is quite the oddball. It's about the size of Jupiter, but the white dwarf it orbits is the size of Earth, so the planet is seven times larger than its star," MacDonald said.

The planet couldn't have always been in such a close orbit to its star. If it had, it would have been obliterated when the star transformed into a red giant before shedding its puffy outer layers and leaving behind a white dwarf.

An illustration showing NASA's exoplanet hunter TESS. (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)) "The big question is how WD 1856 b ended up where it is today, and there are two theories," team member Christopher O'Connor of Northwestern University said. "One is that the planet was swallowed by the host star as it was dying, and managed to survive on the inside. The other is that the migration took place due to the gravitational effect of other objects in the system. The white dwarf is part of a triple star system, and the outer companion stars could have influenced WD 1856 b's orbit."

The clue that allowed the team to differentiate between these migration mechanisms was the temperature of WD 1856 b, which at 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) is about 240 degrees hotter than it would be if its only source of heat were the light from its white dwarf parent star.

With no energy available to warm the planet to these temperatures, the team reasoned that the temperature must be a residual effect of prior warming either from being engulfed by the red giant or during an inward migration. Using observations of the planet's mass of between four and 11 times that of Jupiter, the team was able to model how it would have cooled over time.

WD 1856 b watches from a safe distance as its parent star transforms into a red giant and destroys its inner planetary system (Image credit: Robert Lea (Created with Canva)) MacDonald and colleagues determined that WD 1856 b was likely heated up around 3 billion to 5.5 billion years ago. Its host star has been a white dwarf for longer than that, which means the exoplanet was safe during the star's destructive red giant phase, and moved into its tight orbit afterwards.

"As the planet moved inwards, its interactions with the strong gravity of the white dwarf will have caused it to warm up considerably, and it has been cooling ever since," O'Connor said.

The results indicate that Jupiter could move closer to the sun after the violent drama of its red giant phase and the destruction of the inner solar system. The findings also demonstrate the incredible observing power of the JWST and how the $10 billion space telescope is still discovering things no other instrument can.

"White dwarfs like WD 1856 are exceptionally dim compared to the planet-hosting stars we normally observe with the JWST," team member Victoria Boehm of Cornell University said.

"To make things even harder, the planet's transit only lasts 8 minutes, so it's very much if you blink you miss it! Capturing enough light to see WD 1856's spectrum, while also doing so quickly enough to not miss the transit, is something only Webb can do."