First Hints of a Planet Orbiting in a White Dwarf's Habitable Zone

A distant white dwarf is surrounded by space rocks marching in perfect time. This observation offers hints of what may be the first planet we have detected in the habitable zone of one of these stellar corpses, suggesting that they might be just as good for life as bigger, younger stars. From a report: "A lot of people think of a white dwarf as a dead system or a dead end, but this tells us that there is a lot of stuff going on around white dwarfs," says Jay Farihi at University College London. He and his colleagues spotted these hints while observing a star called WD 1054-226, which lies about 118 light years away, using several powerful telescopes. They found that something appeared to be regularly passing in front of the star, causing dips in its light. The biggest dip happened every 23.1 minutes, in a pattern that repeated every 25 hours.The measurements indicate, the report says, that the star is surrounded by a ring of 65 comet-sized or moon-sized objects, remarkably evenly spaced in their orbits.

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