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Nature reports on an Italian scientist's striking discovery of a planet that seems to have survived the explosion of its own sun. Not that the experience would have been pleasant, mind you.
Over billions of years, stars like our sun consume the hydrogen in their core. Outer layers then collapse into the center, fusing and heating the core, resulting in an expansion into a red giant some 100 times larger than the star's original size. Naturally, anything caught inside the envelope of this process, out to about twice the radius of the Earth's orbit, is believed to be incinerated.
Now, however, Astronomer Roberto Silvotti at Naples' National Institute for Astrophysics has observed a "hot type-B subdwarf" star that has already gone through the red giant stage, which still has a planet apparently well within what scientists believed was the danger zone.
The planet now orbits the collapsed star once every 3.2 years, as a monument to interplanetary indestructibility. (Maybe it ought to be dubbed, with all due honors, "Planet Cockroach.")
This doesn't necessarily mean much for Earth's own survival, Nature
points out, even though our planet's orbit will likely expand by half, to roughly the same distance as Silvotti's discovery, by the time the sun explodes.
Matt Burleigh, an astronomer from the University of Leicester, UK, tells Nature:
Silvotti's full findingswere published in the most recent issue of Nature
Planet survives stellar explosion [Nature]
(Image Credit: NASA)
