Giant planet found orbiting a dead star shows what may happen when our sun dies

This unusual duo was discovered 6,500 light-years away, near the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The pairing is unexpected because this gas giant exoplanet with a mass similar to Jupiter's is orbiting a white dwarf.

By observing the system, researchers were able to determine that the planet and star formed around the same time and the planet survived the star's death. The planet is about 2.8 AU from the star. An AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance between Earth and the sun, or 92 million miles . "Earth's future may not be so rosy because it is much closer to the Sun," said David Bennett, study coauthor and senior research scientist at the University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in a statement.

The researchers used the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, as well as its Near-Infrared Camera, to observe the white dwarf and planet. The white dwarf is 60% the mass of our sun, and the planet is about 40% more massive than Jupiter. "There should also be smaller mass planets orbiting white dwarfs," Bennett wrote in an email. "Our microlensing surveys detect similar numbers of Jupiters and Neptunes, but we are more sensitive to Jupiters. So, we've found that Neptune mass planets are about 10 times more common than Jupiters in these wider orbits that will survive the end stages of stellar evolution. We expect that we will find planets of a range of masses orbiting white dwarfs.

The telescope will directly image giant planets and survey the planets orbiting white dwarfs across our galaxy, providing scientists with a better ratio of how many are destroyed by stellar evolution and how many survive.

Our sun is going to live long enough to FRY everyone of us if we don't start something now .

but not ours, because it will literally be swallowed by the sun and turned into distant elements that will keep it burning for billions more years.

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