Nature can get brutal. On a cosmic scale, things get even more destructive—leaving behind carnage made of stellar dust the size of an entire planet. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a white dwarf—the remnant of a dying star’s core—enjoying a meal of some fragment researchers later identified as coming from a Pluto-like object. […]
The Coldest Planet Ever Seen Is Circling a Stellar Corpse
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have directly detected the faint glow of a planet that’s colder than any world whose light has been directly observed—an astonishing detection that reveals the extreme conditions of some worlds in our universe. The exoplanet, WD 1856+534 b, was first spotted in 2020 and is twice as old […]