Giant Planet Survives Star's Death, Offering Glimpse of Solar System's Future

Eighty light-years from Earth, a Jupiter-sized planet orbits a dead star no larger than our own world — and in doing so, rewrites what we thought we knew about endings. WD 1856 b should not exist: conventional wisdom held that a star's death was a planetary death sentence, yet this world survived its sun's red giant phase, migrated inward, and endures. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have now read the chemical memory written in its atmosphere, finding in a distant world's survival a possible portrait of our own solar system's fate five billion years hence.