Scientists Detect Signs Of Strange Planets Forming Inside Dying Stars

Reference: Found here

"I never expected that it would be possible to form a planet… inside a star," said Jason Nordhaus of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. He and his team explored this unexpected possibility using models of a planet named WD 1856+534 b, which orbits a white dwarf about 80 light-years from Earth. The planet is roughly the size of Jupiter but orbits extremely close to its star—only 2% of the distance between Earth and the Sun.

Typically, planets form from a disc of dust surrounding a star, the same disc that creates the star itself, as seen in our solar system. However, this process cannot produce a planet so close to a white dwarf, as the star's intense gravitational pull would destroy a young planet.

While the concept isn't entirely new, as similar ideas have been applied to neutron stars, it is more convincing in the case of white dwarfs, which typically do not have nearby planets. Philipp Podsiadlowski of the University of Oxford noted, "There have been various claims [of exoplanets] around white dwarfs, but they mostly turned out to be just oscillations of the star, not planets. This is a much stronger case."

India Elections | Read Latest News on Lok Sabha Elections 2024 Live on NDTV.com . Get Election Schedule , information on candidates, in-depth ground reports and more - #ElectionsWithNDTV