A solar system that looks like ours … after Earth gets destroyed.
The microlensing, which took place in 2010, required a network of telescopes, and though that data told the team about the mass of the star and its exoplanet, it didn’t provide a direct picture. So, the team followed up years later with the Keck Observatory in Hawaii—which houses one of the largest optical telescopes in the world—to try and observe the star itself.
The telescope should have been powerful enough to see any typical star at that distance. Eventually, they realized that the fact that they couldn’t detect the star wasn’t a failure in the equipment—it meant that the star was simply too dim to see. That left only a few explanations. In the future, the team hopes to observe the white dwarf directly with the Hubble or James Webb Space Telescope, Blackman says, both of which “see deep enough into the sky that we will be able to directly look at the light from the white dwarf.”First, it’s rare. This is the first time microlensing has been used to find a white dwarf and only the fifth white dwarf ever to be found with an exoplanet, according to Blackman.
The system Blackman’s team found is a lone star with a gas giant about 40 percent larger than Jupiter that’s traveling in a roughly similar orbit to it. The planet appears to have survived the death of the star “more or less untouched,” Blackman says. The find is the first concrete evidence to the idea that our outer planets could survive the death of the sun.
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