Most stars will end their lives as white dwarfs. White dwarfs are the remnant cores of once-luminous stars like our Sun, but they’ve left their lives of fusion behind and no longer generate heat. They’re destined to glow with only their residual energy for billions of years before they eventually fade to black. Could life … Continue reading 'Planet Found in the Habitable Zone of a White Dwarf'
Most stars will end their lives as white dwarfs. White dwarfs are the remnant cores of once-luminous stars like our Sun, but they’ve left their lives of fusion behind and no longer generate heat. They’re destined to glow with only their residual energy for billions of years before they eventually fade to black.For life to exist around a white dwarf, the white dwarf would have to have planets in its slowly shrinking habitable zone.
The New Technology Telescope at the ESO’s La Silla Observatory. Image Credit: By Masteruk – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3235044The team found dips in light that they interpret as 65 clouds of planetary debris. The clouds are evenly spaced and orbit the white dwarf every 25 hours. What causes such regularity? The researchers say that a planet must be there, which forces these debris clouds into a precise orbital pattern.
This figure from the study shows the first three nights of ULTRACAM observations of WD1054-226. The figure shows a notable and easily recognized recurring feature, the double-dip structure that recurs every 25.2 hours and occurs just before hours 2, 27, and 52. The authors say that “Using this structure as a visual anchor, the adjacent, antecedent, and subsequent transits can all be seen to have the same morphology over all three nights.” Image Credit: Farihi et al. 2022.
Not all of the team’s observational data repeats with predictable regularity. The researchers also found at least two transient drifters in the data. “At least two drifting transits may be seen to recur over three or more nights,” the team writes in their paper. The faster of the two has a period of about 22.9 hours, and the slower of the two has a period of about 25.5 hours.
The 65 separate structures the astronomers found could be moons or nascent moons. But if they are, they’re nothing like the moons we’re accustomed to. “The moon-sized structures we have observed are irregular and dusty rather than solid, spherical bodies. Their absolute regularity is a mystery we cannot currently explain,” said lead author Farihi.
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