A new study has found that planetary debris that includes moon-sized objects may indicate the presence of a rocky planet within the habitable zone around a dead star, according to the Jeddah Astronomical Society through its official account on the social networking platform “Facebook”.
The possibility of a rocky planet similar to Earth
The dead star likely to have a rocky planet next to it, a white dwarf called WD1054-226, which is a cold remnant of a star that has exhausted all fuel, and if that planet is confirmed outside the solar system, it would be an advance for white dwarf science, only one planet has previously been discovered. It orbits a white dwarf but is a gas giant planet similar to Jupiter, not near the habitable zone.
In general, confirming the existence of the planet with current technology will not be easy, as it is done by comparing computer models by conducting more observations of the star and the debris that orbits it, and the star WD1054-226 is only 117 light years away from Earthwhich is close enough to be observed directly by many telescopes.
white dwarf
The researchers realized that a planet might orbit the white dwarf due to the apparent dips in the star’s light detected by the 3.5-meter European Southern Observatory telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. Additional observations using the TESS space telescope contributed NASAto find out why these changes in brightness occur.
The data suggest that dips in WD1054–226’s brightness correspond to 65 “evenly spaced” planetary debris clouds orbiting the star every 25 hours.
The uniform distribution of debris in space suggests that a rocky planet the size of Earth might keep everything in place. White dwarfs are important because they provide an overview of what will happen in our solar system when the sun runs out of hydrogen in about five billion years.
A potential planet around the star WD1054–26 is conveniently located in the habitable zone, orbiting at a distance of 2.5 million km from the star, about 28 times closer than Mercury to the Sun.
Even more interesting, all the debris and the potential planet may have formed or somehow arrived in the region after the red giant’s collapse into the white dwarf, because the material is so close that it was devoured by the red giant.