'Ghost waves' emanating from the dead stars

Studying "ghost waves" allows scientists to better understand how a Solar System is created, its life cycle and its end, as well as our own Solar System.

Planets orbiting a dead star emit special electromagnetic radiation that we can capture from Earth. This radiation allows humans to detect, even imagine, what the dead Solar System was like billions of years ago, when the central star was still full of nuclear fuel and shining brightly.

Astronomers from the University of Warwick, UK, say they can capture these radio waves , which emanate from an alien core orbiting the white dwarf star.

Illustration of a white dwarf - and what's left of a solar system after the central star has died.(Photo: Mark A. Garlick).

The core of the star will form a white dwarf when the surrounding layers of hot gas material are exhausted, gravity pulls them together into a dense material, much cooler than the previous star.

White dwarfs can last for a long, dim moment (our sun will be as bright as the moon on the full moon day when turned into white dwarfs) because it burns very little fuel.

Due to the dim light, it is difficult to detect these cores remotely. But scientists can observe the magnetic interaction between the core of a star and the planets orbiting it. Because the planet's core has metallic elements, when orbiting the white dwarf core, it forms a closed circuit and emits radio waves. Scientists want to capture these waves.

"A planet core too close to a white dwarf will be destroyed, a core too far away to be detected , " said Dr. Dimitri Veras, lead author of the study. Also, if the magnetic field is too strong, the planetary core will hit the white dwarf and destroy it. Therefore, only the planets around white dwarfs should have a weaker magnetic field and a distance between 3 times the distance of Mercury and the Sun.

The most famous sight of a dying star belongs to the Ring Nebula, discovered in 1779. (Image: Forbes).

Modeling shows that the core of the dead planet can live up to 100 million years, even up to a billion years.

The team will "capture ghost waves" using radio telescopes such as Arecibo in Puerto Rico, and the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia, USA to search for planetary cores orbiting white dwarfs. This research allows scientists to better understand how a Solar System was created, its life cycle and its end, as well as our own.