A Jupiter-size planet that escaped its star's death
摘要
天文学家利用詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜首次详细观测了WD 1856 b，这颗木星大小的行星是已知唯一幸存于类太阳恒星死亡后的行星。它围绕一颗白矮星运行，而该白矮星是类太阳恒星燃烧殆尽后的残骸。新发现使这一本已奇特的系统更加令人费解。WD 1856 b最初于2020年由TESS望远镜意外发现，当时团队正搜寻白矮星周围的小天体，却发现了这颗气体巨星。
WD 1856 b is the only confirmed case of a planet that survived the death of a Sun-like star. It’s a Jupiter-size world orbiting a white dwarf—the burned-out remnant of a Sun-like star. Now, a team of astronomers has used the James Webb Space Telescope to take a closer look at this planet for the first time, and what they found makes an already strange system even stranger.
A feeding frenzy
WD 1856 b was an accidental discovery. Astronomers pointed the TESS observatory at a sample of roughly 2,000 white dwarfs in 2020. These stars are the remains of a Sun-like star that have already gone through a red-giant phase, leaving behind an Earth-size body that’s primarily composed of elements like carbon and oxygen. The TESS team was searching for small objects like comets or asteroids that might transit across the face of these dead stars.
What they found in the WD 1856 system was a gas giant. “As soon as they looked at it, they said, okay, that’s weird,” said Christopher O’Connor, a theoretical astrophysicist at Cornell University and co-author of the recent Nature study on WD 1856 b.
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