The rocky planet, called KMT-2020-BLG-0414, is located 4,000 light-years from Earth and orbits a smoldering white dwarf — an object that was once a large star like our Sun.
Stars of this size live for an average of about 10 billion years, and after that period they turn into red giants, swallowing up nearby planets. If a similar fate somehow bypasses our Earth, it will become similar to the one found by KMT-2020-BLG-0414 — an empty rocky planet gradually moving away from a dying white dwarf.
Details about KMT-2020-BLG-0414 are described in an article published on September 26 in the journal Nature Astronomy (via livescience).
«At this time, we don’t have a consensus on whether the Earth will be able to avoid being swallowed by the Sun,» says astronomer and lead author Keming Zhang of the University of California. «In any case, the planet will be habitable for about a billion years, after which the Earth’s oceans will evaporate — long before the risk of being swallowed by the red giant».
The distant planetary system is located near the bulge
Bulge — a cluster of stars in the central zone of a spiral galaxy that is spherical in shape; the inner, densest part of the spheroidal component of a spiral galaxy. In spiral galaxies observed «from the» edge, the bulge appears as a spherical thickening in the center of the disk. in the center of our galaxy, and astronomers first noticed it in 2020, when it moved against the light of an even more distant star located 25,000 light-years away.
Later, a planet was also spotted near the star, orbiting at twice the distance from its star compared to the distance between the Earth and the Sun (the planet itself is also twice as large as ours). In addition to the white dwarf, a brown dwarf — about 17 times larger than Jupiter was also spotted in the system.
The fate of humanity in the future has long been the subject of wild speculation: scientists do not know whether the Earth will survive the red giant phase, and before that — the effects of global warming. However, Zhang suggests that humans may one day «jump» to the satellites Europa and Enceladus, which orbit Jupiter and Saturn, respectively, — ice worlds that will become water worlds in the future.
«When the Sun becomes a red giant, the habitable zone will move to the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, and many of these moons will become ocean planets,» Zhang says. «I think that in this case, humanity could migrate there».
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