Surviving the red giant stage at three times the distance from the Sun to the Earth… Increases the likelihood of life beings even after a star dies
(Seoul = Yonhap News) In the process of a main sequence star like the sun going through the expansion stage of a red giant in the last stage of stellar evolution, a planet orbiting a white dwarf star that survived and died without being destroyed like Jupiter was discovered for the first time in academia. was reported to 2021.10.14. [W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko 제공/ 재판매 및 DB 금지] photo@yna.co.kr
About 5 billion years later, in the final stage of stellar evolution, the Sun burns the nearby Earth and becomes a white dwarf with only the remains of it. Jupiter is predicted to still orbit the sun, which has become a surviving and dead star thanks to its remoteness.
A research team led by Joshua Blackman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tasmania in Australia, has discovered a planetary system in which a Jupiter planet orbits a white dwarf at the center of our galaxy about 6,500 light-years away, published in the scientific journal Nature.
According to Nature and foreign media, the Jupiter planet, named MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb, was first discovered through the phenomenon of refracting starlight due to gravity. ) and concluded that it orbits a white dwarf with only faint light at a distance.
It has been pointed out that these results suggest a distant future for the solar system, and increase the possibility that living things can survive even if the stars die.
“This finding confirms that planets far enough away from the stars can continue to exist after the stars die,” said Blackman. “This suggests that it can survive the stage of exhausting its fuel, expanding and becoming a red giant.”
“The Earth is so close to the sun that the future may not be rosy,” said David Bennett, a senior researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, co-author of the paper. “If they migrate to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, they can still remain in solar orbit, even if they cannot rely on the heat of the sun to become a white dwarf.”
Previously, the Jupiter planet WD1856 b orbiting a white dwarf was discovered and reported to academia, but the orbital period of the star is 1.4 days, and after the star becomes a white dwarf, it moves to its current location and orbits about 2.8 AU away from MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb. pointed out differently.
In the final stage of evolution, a main sequence star like the Sun burns all the hydrogen fuel in its nucleus and swells up, destroying the surrounding planets in the process of becoming a red giant. It becomes a blue-white star, a white dwarf.
Using a laser-guided stellar adaptive optical system and a near-infrared camera (NIRC2) installed at the WM Kek Observatory on Mt Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the research team used a near-infrared camera (NIRC2) to make white dwarfs about 60% larger than the Sun and planets about 40% larger than Jupiter’s. confirmed that
When the ‘Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’, which NASA will launch in the mid-2020s, is activated, the research team will conduct a full-scale exploration of planets orbiting a white dwarf in the central bulge of the galaxy to confirm whether it is common for Jupiter planets to survive the last stage of stellar evolution. I expected it to be possible.
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