Dying stars may host habitable planets

Dying stars may host Earth-like planets with life, and scientists might be able to detect them within the next decade, astronomers say. Researchers have found that they could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf’s planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star. ‘In the quest for extraterrestrial biological signatures, the first stars we study should be white dwarfs,’ said Avi Loeb, theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). When a star like the Sun dies, it puffs off its outer layers, leaving behind a hot core called a white dwarf. A typical white dwarf is about the size of Earth. It slowly cools and fades over time, but it can retain heat long enough to warm a nearby world for billions of years. A habitable planet would circle the white dwarf once every 10 hours at a distance of about a million miles.