How will our solar system end? A distant planet offers clues

By Tom Metcalfe -

A dark planet surrounding the faint residue of a charred star about 6,000 light-years from Earth reveals what our solar system may look like at the end of its existence, astronomers say.

This distant survivor, described in a study published last week in the prestigious journal Nature,

and provides a picture of a planetary system around a dying star, according to the research authors.

The star is a "white dwarf", the glowing stellar remains left over from the death of its "red giant" phase, when it expanded tens of thousands of times after having exhausted hydrogen fuel for its nuclear fusion reactions, and it collapsed a few hundred million years later.

The planets closest to the star may have been destroyed

, and the same fate is likely to befall our world when the Sun burns all of its hydrogen around 5 billion years from now.

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"When the Sun expands in what is known as its red giant phase, it

" says lead study author Joshua Blackman, an astronomer at the University of Tasmania. in Australia.

Much earlier,

Its red giant phase will cause lava lakes, broken continents and devastating explosions of intense ionizing radiation, if it does not completely fragment our planet, Blackman explained in an email.

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But it is not all bad news:

the burning of the Sun. The detection of the distant planet orbiting a white dwarf reinforces that idea.

"Our discovery proves that the standard picture of how planetary systems evolve when their star dies is probably correct," Blackman said.

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The newly found white dwarf was detected towards the center of our galaxy

by a gravitational effect called "microlensing" as it passed in front of an even more distant star.

The white dwarf's gravity made the distant star appear brighter for a few years (a brief flash in astronomical time) as its mass focused the light through the gravitational lens, said Jean-Philippe Beaulieu of the Institute for Astrophysics. de Paris, who led the research and is a co-author of the study.

.

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In fact, thanks to the microlensing, the white dwarf system could be detected.

Although the team tried to see it with the giant telescopes at Hawaii's Keck Observatory, it was too faint to see it.

They hope to get better results soon with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in December and will be able to directly observe the shadowed system, Beaulieu said.

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Blackman said the gas giant, whose mass is about 1.4 times that of Jupiter, orbits at a distance of between 260 and 600 million miles from the white dwarf. 

Although it is likely to have formed farther than its current orbit, the host star's shrinkage after its red giant phase has not brought it close enough to fragment it, which has been theorized in some models.

"We believe that

" he said.

Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy and director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, said the new discovery is further evidence that

Mars and the outer gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) are expected to survive the burning of the Sun.ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI / Getty Images / Science Photo Libra

Kaltenegger, who was not involved in the latest research, was part of a team that detected another giant planet orbiting a white dwarf star late last year, the first ever seen.

However, that study showed that

, so it is much closer to the white dwarf than Mercury is to the Sun. 

The researchers say something similar is likely to happen here billions of years from now when the Sun runs out of fuel and destroys Earth and the inner planets, with

Kaltenegger pointed out that it likely formed much farther away, spiraling as the star shrank to a stop a few million miles away.

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Taken together, the discoveries show that the outer planets, and perhaps their moons, can survive the disappearance of their stars, although their final orbits appear to depend on their circumstances, he added.

Although the remains of white dwarfs do not produce much light, they do generate enough heat for their inner planets, which implies that

like this, perhaps under the scabs. frosts on the moons of gas giants, such as Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus, he claimed.