The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) recently saw a glimpse of Earth's distant future.
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) recently discovered potential signs of a rocky exoplanet orbiting a white dwarf star called WD 1054-226, per Space.com.
The white dwarf star and the exoplanet orbiting it is located 117 light-years away from Earth, in the Crater constellation, according to News 9 Live's article.
What did TESS see?
NASA's TESS saw planetary debris and objects the size of moons within WD 1054-226's habitable zone, possible hints that a rocky exoplanet the size of Earth could be 1.6 million miles from WD 1054-226, a distance that is in the white dwarf star's habitable zone.
The habitable zone, also known as the "Goldilocks Zone," is usually defined as where liquid water may exist on the surface of a rocky planet.
Researchers also noticed "pronounced dips in light," or times when a star's light gradually waxes and wanes for a significant amount of time. They did so using the ESO's 3.5-meter New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
WD1054-226's dips in light match with 65 "evenly spaced" planetary debris clouds that go around the star every 25 hours, scientists noted. As such, the regular distribution of space debris suggests that an Earth-sized terrestrial planet might be keeping everything in place.
Only one other planet was discovered to be orbiting a white dwarf. However, that planet was found to be a gas giant, a planet similar to our solar system's Jupiter, and nowhere near the white dwarf star's habitable zone.
A white dwarf star is the final stage of stars eight times as massive as our solar system's Sun after they become a red giant. The transformation from a star to a white dwarf happens when a star runs out of hydrogen to fuel itself. Scientists predict that the Sun will undego this transformation in about five billion years.
What This Means for Science
Researchers were surprised with their findings initially. Astrophysicist Jay Farihi of the University College London said that the possibility of a major planet in the habitable zone is "exciting and also unexpected; we were not looking for this," according to the Royal Astronomical Society's website.
Should researchers be right, the discovery of the exoplanet would be a breakthrough for white dwarf science.
However, Professor Farihi cautioned about the necessary procedures to confirm the presence of the exoplanet as it can't be directly observed on Earth.
"We cannot observe the planet directly, so confirmation may come by comparing computer models with further observations of the star and orbiting debris," Professor Farihi said.
Professor Farihi is the Lead author of the study that discovered the hints of a rocky exoplanet around WD 1054-226, which is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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