Astronomers from the University of St Andrews in Scotland have used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to study a Jupiter-sized exoplanet, called WD 1856 b, orbiting a white dwarf star. The research provides insight into the future of our solar system, suggesting that Earth will be destroyed when the sun dies in about 5 billion years.
The Sun’s Life Cycle
The sun will run out of hydrogen fuel in its core and swell up to become a red giant star, destroying Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth. The research team found that the planet WD 1856 b is significantly warmer than expected and has a temperature of around 400 Kelvins, indicating that it must have been heated by its host star in the past.
The team used models of how sub-stellar objects like WD 1856 b cool down over time to project its temperature back in time and deduce how long ago the heating must have happened. They concluded that the heating most likely happened between 3 billion and 5.5 billion years after the star became a white dwarf.
Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.
