Earth-Like Planet Discovered Orbiting An Alien Star. There's Just One Big Problem.

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The hunt is on for a second Earth, somewhere out there in the Milky Way galaxy, but a newly discovered world is not quite the thing.

And the work, led by astronomer Keming Zhang of the University of California, shows the potential for the way it was discovered – a phenomenon known as microlensing – to locate other hard-to-find Earth-like worlds elsewhere in the galaxy.

Eventually, the star will eject its outer material completely, and the core will collapse under gravity to form a dense object, its bright light not generated by fusion, but the residual heat of its collapse process. That hot core is the white dwarf, and it will take trillions of years to cool to complete darkness.

The red giant phase is pretty crazy. The star's outer atmosphere can expand to hundreds of times its initial size; some projections of the Sun's future – due to start becoming a red giant in about 5 billion years or so – predict it could grow as large as out to the orbit of Mars , engulfing Mercury , Venus , and Earth in the process.

We don't know what this will mean for our planet. Its destruction is possible. But this new discovery of an Earth-like world orbiting a white dwarf suggests that survival is also an option.

"The simplest explanation is that the planet survived through the red giant host star," Zhang told ScienceAlert.

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