Sunday, February 16, 2025

A habitable system's second wind

A few years ago a planet was found in the habitable zone of a... white dwarf. The usual A or F type would have expanded to delete everything out to, like, 2 AU. We have plenty of polluted dwarfs out there, even one in the act of gobbling pollution. But not all the disrupted matter would have become pollution. A planet this close to the star must have collected itself secondarily from the debris left over from the star's exit from main-sequence.

Last week UC Irvine asked after habitability prospects in a tidally-locked secondary planet. It might actually work. If somehow volatiles can be delivered down here.

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