Space and astronomy news
An Earth-sized remnant of a Sun-like star is ringed by dust and debris. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger
In a few billion years, our Sun will die. It will first enter a red giant stage, swelling in size to perhaps the orbit of Earth. Its outer layers will be cast off into space, while its core settles to become a white dwarf. Life on Earth will boil away, and our planet itself might be consumed by the Sun. White dwarfs are the fate of all midsize stars, and given the path of their demise, it seems reasonable to assume that any planets die with their sun.
More than a dozen planets have been discovered orbiting white dwarf stars. That’s a small fraction of the known exoplanets, but it tells us that planets can survive the red giant stage of a Sun-like star. Some planets may be consumed, and the orbits of survivors might be dramatically affected, but some planets retain a stable orbit.
Although white dwarfs don’t undergo nuclear fusion, they do remain warm for billions of years. Young white dwarfs can have a surface temperature of 27,000 K or more, and it takes billions of years for them to cool. Since the simple definition of a star’s habitable zone is simply the range where a planet is warm enough for liquid water, this means all white dwarfs have a habitable zone. Unlike main sequence stars, however, this region would migrate inward as the star cools.
All that said, finding life on a white dwarf planet is a long shot. The planets would likely have to migrate inward during the latter part of the red dwarf stage, maintain a stable orbit, and somehow retain or recapture the kind of water-rich atmosphere you need for terrestrial life. That’s a big ask. But given how easy it might be to detect biosignatures, it’s worth taking a look.
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