Scientists Found a Planet Orbiting a Dead Star
via MOTHERBOARD
You are an alien astronomer living 4.5 billion years from now. The Sun that the Earth orbits has died and become a white dwarf. What would you see if you looked at humanity’s former Solar System?
Based on the first discovery of a giant planet orbiting a white dwarf, reported in two new papers in the journals Nature and Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers now believe that this hypothetical alien would be able to observe signatures of our Solar System’s largest planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—just by looking at the dead Sun.