‘Evaporating Planet’ spotted in orbit around White Dwarf Star

The atmosphere of a surviving giant planet orbiting a white dwarf star is being stripped away — a hint as to what our solar system may look like in the future.

This illustration shows the white dwarf WDJ0914+1914 and its Neptune-like exoplanet. Since the icy giant orbits the hot white dwarf at close range, the extreme ultraviolet radiation from the star strips away the planet’s atmosphere. While most of this stripped gas escapes, some of it swirls into a disc, itself accreting onto the white dwarf. (ESO/M. Kornmesser)

Researchers have used the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to spot a giant planet orbiting a white dwarf star. The first time astronomers have spotted a surviving planet orbiting such a star. If that is not remarkable enough, the planet’s close orbit is causing this remnant of a Sun-like star to strip away its atmosphere. This gives researchers a hint as to what the solar system may look like in the distant future when the Sun is reaching the end of its life.

The discovery was made by researchers inspecting 7000 white dwarfs catalogued by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). They observed that one white dwarf was unlike the others. Analysing subtle variations in the light from the star uncovered traces of chemical elements in amounts never before observed around a white dwarf.

“It was one of those chance discoveries,” says researcher Boris Gänsicke, from the University of Warwick in the UK, who led the study, published in the journal Nature. “We knew that there had to be something exceptional going on in this system, and…