There are white dwarfs in the universe. Many of them have planets that may be in the right place for life. Scientists have come up with a way to find that life.
There are between a few hundred billion and a trillion planets in the universe. That is correct, a trillion. Astronomers have been able to confirm the existence of only a few thousand planets.
We've found almost all of the planets with the same mass as the sun. For a few reasons, this is the case. We are looking for planets around sunlike stars because we want to find life like our own. There are two sunlike stars in the picture. Smaller red dwarf stars are dimmer than sunlike stars, which makes finding planets more difficult.
More than half of all sunlike stars may have a planet.
White dwarfs are Earth-sized cores of carbon and oxygen and will eventually evolve into planets. It will happen to the sun as well.
There should be a lot of planets around white dwarfs because they are very common. There have been only a few exotic examples. One is a gas giant planet that is eight times the size of Jupiter and takes more than 150,000 years to complete. A gas giant is called PSR B1620-26 (AB) b.
There are two challenges for anyone looking to find exoplanets. The transit method in which we stare at a star and wait for the exoplanet to cross in front of it doesn't work because they are very small and dim. Two, white dwarfs don't have a lot of star features, so the other popular method, which involves watching the redshift and blueshift of star features, doesn't work either.
Is it possible for planets to live as their host star dies and becomes a red dwarf? It's not pretty when a star dies. The star swells as it consumes planets that are too close to it. It goes through millions of years of violent spasms that cause a huge amount of material to leave the surrounding system and wreak havoc on the other worlds.
It's possible that a white dwarf could end up with planets. Some planets may be far away from the carnage to allow them to stay in their orbits. There can be interactions between the planets and the ejected material. A new planetary system can be created from the debris of the old ones.
It is possible to make Earth- like planets around white dwarfs. The white dwarf is very close to the stars because they are dim and small.
Finding Earth-like planets around white dwarfs would help us understand the fate of our own solar system and give us a new place to look for life.
How would we find this alien life. Astronomers have created a road map to help them find exoplanets around white dwarfs. The paper detailing their plans was accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The usual methods of looking for planets around white dwarfs won't work for them because they're too small. The ratio of the sun's temperature to Earth's temperature is similar to that of a white dwarf. The white dwarf's light contains some of the light from the planet. We could detect a exoplanet if we compared that light with a white dwarf that has no planets around it.
The telescope could look at the nearest white dwarfs and possibly find planets that are in the right place. The technique only works if the planet has the right temperature and size. This method can be used to find an Earth-like planet that is warm by greenhouse gases or a smaller planet that is much hotter. If the planet is too small or cold, the light from the system won't show up to a level that would be visible to the naked eye.
This method will be able to pick out carbon dioxide if that exoplanet has a lot of it. It wouldn't be a sure sign of life, but it would be an encouraging find.
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