“Scientists have discovered a rocky world orbiting another star that already went through its red giant phase. This planet now orbits a white dwarf, the smaller stellar body that remains after a star burns out. Crucially, the planet looks like it once orbited the star in the same position Earth currently travels around our sun, and did so until it was pushed to a more distant orbit, twice the Earth-sun distance, sometime before the dying giant could eat it. This makes it the first potential rocky world to be observed orbiting a white dwarf.

‘We don’t know if Earth can survive,’ said Keming Zhang, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, who led the work published on Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy. ‘If it does, it’ll end up somewhere like this system.'”

From New York Times.