One day, in about five billion years, the Sun will run out of fuel, swell up 100 times bigger than it is now into a red giant star, and swallow up Mercury, Venus and maybe Earth. Whether the more distant planets, especially gas giants Saturn and Jupiter, will survive is unknown. 

New research by an international team of astronomers, including Cornell’s Victoria Boehm, used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe a Jupiter-sized exoplanet that did survive its star’s death, offering the first window into the future of planets like Jupiter after the death of the Sun.

The study, which published July 1 in Nature ("Aerosols and Hydrocarbons in the Atmosphere of a White Dwarf Planet,") used Webb to watch the exoplanet WD 1856 b pass in front of its star in a so-called grazing transit where the very top of the planet partly overlapped the star. The transit yielded unique information about the planet’s mass and temperature, enabling the scientists to estimate the planet at between four and eleven times Jupiter’s mass. Light from the star passing through the planet’s atmosphere picked up information about the atmosphere’s chemical composition, as well. 

"We’re used to looking back in time when we use telescopes, but this is the first time we have been able to look forward to what might happen to the outer planets around the remnant of a Sun-like star. It's like using a time machine to peer into the distant future of our Solar System,” said lead author Ryan MacDonald, at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom and a former postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Nikole Lewis, associate professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.