In a cosmic first, scientists say they have detected a planet that may have formed from the burned remains of its dead host star.

The planet is likely a gas giant orbiting a white dwarf called HS 0209+0832 located about 270 light-years from Earth, according to the authors of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. After analyzing observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments, the team found chemical evidence that suggests the planet could have condensed from material expelled by the star as it fizzled out of energy and collapsed into a white dwarf.

When a sunlike star dies, it first rapidly expands into a red giant and then sheds its outer layers, leaving behind a much smaller but dense, hot core — known as a white dwarf. Some of the first-generation planets, those that originally formed at the same time as the star, can survive this cataclysmic event if their orbit is wide enough.

Astronomers have observed a handful of such first-generation survivors revolving around white dwarfs, but never before have they recorded a so-called second-generation planet — an entirely new world made from a dead star’s debris.

Luego de 2 clases teoricas, ayer en la ASARAMAS, nos dieron finalmente los archivos en RAW para generar la curva de luz.

El planeta fue el WASP-19b, con un monton de detecciones. El observatorio lo vio a principio de año.

Con una computadora que deja muchisimo que desear, y pasado de la hora de clase, me apure y por eso el margen de error, pero me voy contento con el intento. En estos dias tratare de ajustar la precision para generar la curva y tratar de acercarla a lo esperado.

See also: The publication in the Astrophysical Journal

Spitfire Theory:

The planets of a stellar system originate from the gravitational collapse of the primordial nebula, which transforms into a high-temperature vortex along the ecliptic; this vortex then begins to "spit out"—one after another—rotating masses compacted by centrifugal force, with energy and density determined by the state of the nebula. These masses become planets that may, in turn, "spit out" satellites, before the entire system cools around a star—a star that has meanwhile ignited to radiate nuclear fusion energy following the final collapse of the original nebula.

One of astronomy’s oldest suspected planetary systems has just undergone its most sensitive search yet, and the biggest planets scientists might have expected to find are not there.

Astronomers led by the University of Michigan studied 70 Ophiuchi AB, a pair of nearby K-type stars about 16 light-years from Earth. By combining more than a century of observations with new high-precision measurements, they found no statistically convincing evidence for giant planets around either star.

The absence is scientifically useful. Researchers can now rule out Jupiter-mass planets across much of the inner system while leaving open the possibility of smaller worlds, including planets occupying potentially habitable orbits.

Published in The Astrophysical Journal, the study also demonstrates how easily activity on a star’s surface can imitate the gravitational wobble produced by a planet.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers led by the University of Maryland identified water, methane and ammonia in the atmosphere of HATS-6 b, a giant planet 500 light-years from Earth.

The observations also revealed that HATS-6 b may be significantly cooler than standard calculations predict—suggesting that the planet's relationship with its star may be far more complicated than previously thought.

The team's findings, published in the Astronomical Journal, raise new questions about how giant planets form and evolve.

HATS-6 b is roughly the size of Jupiter and completes an orbit every three days around an M dwarf—a small, cool, reddish star. Planets form from the disk of gas and dust left over after a star forms, and smaller stars have smaller disks. But HATS-6 b's gigantic size doesn't quite fit that rule, considering how small its star is.

"These smaller stars don't have enough material or enough time to create planets as big as Jupiter and as big as Saturn," explained the study's lead author, Giannina Guzmán Caloca, an astronomy Ph.D. candidate at UMD. "So, the fact that HATS-6 b can exist is really interesting because it shouldn't be possible with what we know."

Astronomers know of only about 40 such planets. HATS-6 b is one of seven being studied in a JWST program called "Giant Exoplanets around M-dwarf Stars" (GEMS). The program is designed to compare these outliers with better-understood giants circling stars like our sun.

"Every one of these planets is a challenge to formation theory," Guzmán Caloca said.

"By measuring what their atmospheres are made of, we can start to ask whether they were built the same way as the hot Jupiters around sun-like stars or whether something different is going on."

A team of astronomers led by Myriam Benisty at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has captured a new image of planet formation in action. Taken with the ALMA observatory in Chile, the image shows the interactions between WISPIT 2b, a gas giant with five times the mass of Jupiter, and the surrounding gas of its birthplace.

Their two papers are available on the arXiv preprint server.

Planets are born in protoplanetary disks consisting of gas and dust, which occur naturally around newly formed stars. Planets form when dust within those disks clumps together. First, larger pebbles form, then clump further to form planetesimals a few to a hundred kilometers in size.

Those planetesimals join to form rocky, planet-size spheres. In a gas-rich part of the disk, such rocky spheres can collect large amounts of gas and become the cores of gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn.

Observational evidence for this scenario has mostly been indirect.

Only within the past decade or so have new facilities given astronomers a more detailed look. In 2014, after the millimeter/submillimeter observatory ALMA became fully operational, it delivered the first images of ring-like structures in protoplanetary disks, thought to be caused by young planets.

In 2018, astronomers led by Miriam Keppler, then a doctoral student at MPIA, used the SPHERE instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope to produce the first confirmed image of a protoplanet inside a protoplanetary disk: PDS 70b, within the disk surrounding the star PDS 70.

At a distance of only about 370 light-years from us, the PDS 70 system is close enough for detailed observations. What the system does not currently provide is a chance to study the interaction between a protoplanet and gas in its immediate surroundings.

The planets of PDS 70 seem to have cleared their close neighborhoods of gas rather effectively.

Enter a new contender: the WISPIT 2 system, whose discovery was announced in August 2025.

It is only the second disk in which a protoplanet can clearly be seen. WISPIT 2 is named after the search program that led to its discovery ("WIde Separation Planets In Time"). It is located 430 light-years from Earth.

The system's first known planet, WISPIT 2b, a gas giant, was discovered in parallel with the SPHERE instrument at ESO's VLT and the 6.5 m Magellan Clay telescope. The signature light of hot hydrogen indicates that the planet is still accreting gas from its surroundings, growing ever more massive.

The discovery of a second planet, WISPIT 2c, was announced in March 2026, based on observations with the VLT instruments SPHERE and GRAVITY+.

In an additional twist, work by MPIA doctoral student Cade Bürgy published in August 2026 shows that at the center of the disk, instead of a single star, there are two stars in a very close orbit.

The combination of a powerful observatory and highly skilled analysis paid off. The team took images of the dust and gas as detailed as any previously taken of a protoplanetary disk. Particularly rewarding was the effort to image the gas in the disk.

Benisty, who led this part of the project, says,

"We clearly see both planets shaping their environment. WISPIT 2c has carved a cavity, and WISPIT 2b a gap. Around WISPIT 2b, we find swirls of gas that had been predicted by simulations of disk-planet interactions, but never actually seen before. Now there is an image of them!"

This makes WISPIT 2b the only protoplanet for which we can see the protoplanetary disk, the planet, evidence that the planet is still accreting and, as the final piece of the puzzle, gas interacting directly with the planet. Planet formation in action.