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Astronomers discover first planet born from the ashes of a dead star
The death of a star is not always the end of a planetary system. Sometimes, it marks the starting point for the birth of a new planet — just like the one an international team of astronomers, including scientists from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has just discovered.
The team has found the first known example of a second-generation planet orbiting a white dwarf, a world that appears to have formed from the remnants of the dead star it now circles. The details of the study, led by the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, were published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
A planet reborn from stellar remains
Although scientists had previously suspected that reborn planets might exist around pulsars, this discovery proves that second-generation planet formation around this type of stellar remnant is possible. Second-generation planets are worlds that form from the material a star expels as it dies.
“They are incredibly rare, and finding one around a white dwarf was completely unexpected. It’s like finding a planet that has emerged from the ashes of the very star it once orbited,” explains the study’s first author, Jamie Williams, a doctoral student in the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick.
Reading the chemical fingerprint of a white dwarf
White dwarfs — the collapsed cores left behind when stars exhaust their fuel — are known to pull in material from nearby planets, which can then be detected in their atmospheres. This chemical fingerprint gives astronomers detailed information about the planets orbiting them, and the signal is usually dominated by rock-forming elements such as silicon and iron.
The study focuses on the white dwarf HS 0209+0832, discovered in 1999 by the Hubble Space Telescope, which detected more than a hundred unidentified spectral lines in its atmosphere revealing an unusual chemical composition. Unlike most white dwarfs contaminated by debris from rocky asteroids — whose composition is similar to Earth’s and rich in iron and silicon — HS 0209+0832 contained unusually heavy elements such as zinc, copper and niobium, at concentrations more than a thousand times higher than those found in the Sun.
Models indicate that all these elements formed during the death of a star, and notably, this is the first time niobium has been found in a white dwarf. This pattern of elements is an unmistakable signature of the s-process, a nuclear reaction that generates heavy elements inside dying stars during their red giant phase.
“It’s a chemical fingerprint that no ordinary first-generation planet should have, which told us this new planet was different,” comments Nicholas Stone of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States.
A gas giant orbiting every 4.4 days
The team believes the most likely explanation is that the white dwarf HS 0209+0832 is feeding on a newly formed second-generation giant planet, which condensed from a fresh disc of material created during the star’s death. Since that disc formed from material expelled by the star itself, it would naturally be rich in the unusual heavy elements now appearing in the white dwarf’s atmosphere.
To confirm the presence of this object, the team turned to observations from NASA’s TESS satellite, which detected a faint, regular brightness signal coming directly from the planet, repeating every 4.4 days. This fits with the existence of a Jupiter-sized gas giant in a close orbit, held in place by tidal forces. At such a small distance from the white dwarf, the planet’s outer atmosphere is expected to evaporate under the intense radiation, with the escaping material falling onto the white dwarf’s surface and producing the unusual chemical signal.
A new path to finding reborn worlds
If confirmed, HS 0209+0832 would be the first white dwarf found to host a second-generation planet, opening a new avenue in the search for similar reborn worlds.
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