A Scorching Phoenix Planet May Solve a 3-Decade-Old Astronomical Cold Case - ScienceAlert
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After being born of mostly just hydrogen and helium, a scant 14-ish billion years later the Universe is full of weird planets of wildly varying makes, shapes, and sizes. Well, maybe not shapes, because they're all pretty rotund – it's in the definition of planet. Yet some are truly alien, including oddballs as dense as iron and teeny-tiny 'next door neighbors' that make our modest Venus seem like a giant. Upping the alien ante, astronomers have just announced a suspected exoplanet like no other entity, either in astronomy or in legend: a "phoenix planet" that arose not from its own ashes, but from those of its burned-out mother star. Artist's illustration of the second-generation planet that has formed around white dwarf HS 0209+0832. (Dr Snehalata Sahu/University of Warwick)After nearly three decades of uncertainty, a team led by researchers from the University of Warwick has finally characterized what may be the first second-generation planet ever detected around a white dwarf, one named HS 0209+0832 and located only 270 light-years away. White dwarfs are the cooling cores of formerly Sun-like stars that have exhausted their nuclear fuel.
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