Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2020

16 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020 SPACE CHRONICLES First giant planet around white dwarf found by ESO R esearchers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have, for the first time, found evidence of a giant planet associated with a white dwarf star. The planet orbits the hot white dwarf, the remnant of a Sun- like star, at close range, causing its at- mosphere to be stripped away and form a disc of gas around the star. This unique system hints at what our own Solar System might look like in the distant future. “It was one of those chance discoveries,” says re- searcher Boris Gänsicke, from the University of Warwick in the UK, who led the study, published today in Na- ture . The team had inspected around 7000 white dwarfs observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and found one to be unlike any other. By analysing subtle variations in the light from the star, they found traces of chemical elements in amounts that scientists had never before ob- served at a white dwarf. “We knew