Planet discovery suggests gas giants can outlive the sun

A Jupiter-sized planet has been found orbiting a white dwarf star in the Milky Way, providing clues as to what will happen in our solar system when the sun eventually dies.

An international team of astronomers, led by Joshua Blackman of the University of Tasmania, observed the phenomenon, which forms when a star runs out of nuclear fuel to burn, and dies. The distant planet, a gas giant with a mass 1.4 times that of Jupiter, was able to survive the death of its host star.

Themiya Nanayakkara, an astronomer at the Swinburne University of Technology who was not involved in the research, said the discovery suggested outer gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn could survive the death of the sun. “It rules out theories in the past … that say you can’t have planets around white dwarfs,” she said.