Simon Blouin

An old star like the Sun, at the end of its life, shrinks into a white dwarf — a dense sphere about the size of Earth. After that, it simply cools down, like embers in a campfire. But some white dwarfs somehow stay hot for billions of years. Astronomers studied such objects within a radius of one hundred parsecs from us and found an unexpected pattern.

When a Sun-like star sheds its shells and contracts into a white dwarf, its system sinks into a prolonged twilight. Outer worlds drift away, inner ones evaporate — giant planets, it seemed, were doomed to eternal cold in interstellar emptiness.

When a star dies, it turns into a white dwarf — a dense ball of carbon and oxygen the size of Earth. Predicted by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, these objects were long thought to be lifeless graveyards.