Victoria A. Boehm

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.