In a discovery that could change our understanding of astronomy, a global group of space experts wrote about Wednesday that they accept an intact exoplanet is tightly orbiting a white dwarf, something recently thought to be impossible.

“We report the observation of a giant planet candidate transiting the white dwarf WD 1856+534 every 1.4 days,” the writers write in an article distributed for the scientific journal Nature. “Transiting” refers to when a planet overshadows the star that it circles from the point of view of us on Earth, and is a typical methods by which cosmologists look for exoplanets. The paper additionally clarifies that the planet candidate is about a similar size as Jupiter.

Part of the explanation that the revelation is so odd is that it resists such a large amount of what we think about planet arrangement, as analysts associated with the investigation disclosed to Salon.

Andrew Vanderburg, an associate educator of cosmology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who added to the paper, clarified the discovering’s possible criticalness.

Stars like our sun “burn” hydrogen fuel into helium in atomic combination responses, which heats up our own and different planets. At the point when stars run out of hydrogen, nonetheless, “a couple of unusual processes will occur,” Vanderburg clarifies. “First the star will swell up and get really, really big. This is kind of like its death throes. Once it runs out of hydrogen, it starts burning helium and turning that into a carbon and oxygen, eventually. But this is an inefficient process and it doesn’t last very long. So pretty quickly after the star runs out of hydrogen, it loses much of its mass, so the outer layers of the star all get blown away into space, and what’s left is the hot core of the star, which is no longer producing energy.”

That hot core, Vanderburg clarified, is the thing that we call a white dwarf — and one of the characterizing qualities of a white smaller person is that, due to its strong power of gravity, it will in general draw heavenly bodies toward it and split them up all the while.

The conceivable planet found by the researchers utilizing NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the resigned Spitzer Space Telescope, be that as it may, has apparently stayed unblemished. On the off chance that this is additionally checked, it will be uncommon.

“The explanation that we think is the most likely is that there were other planets in the system or other objects in the system,” Vanderburg clarified. “We know that there are two other stars orbiting this white dwarf very far away. Maybe they could have exerted some influence on this planet that we saw back when it was orbiting far away originally because it had to be orbiting far away, or it would have been engulfed. It could have changed its orbit so that it was very, very elliptical, and then when it came in close to the star, it just barely grazed the surface.”

He included, “The other alternative explanation is that the planet actually would have been engulfed by the star, but it had enough heft to essentially save itself.”

Vanderburg likewise said that, similar to the ongoing disclosure of phosphine gas in the climate of Venus, the new revelation about this planet could propose new sorts of planets to look forever.

“I think the biggest implication for this is that there’s a possibility for life to be in places that we hadn’t really considered before,” Vanderburg told Salon. “Not that people didn’t consider that life could be around white dwarfs — people speculated about that for awhile — but the biggest question that we had was, ‘Can planets actually get to the place in systems where they would need to be in order for life to be similar to the way it is on Earth, but around [a] white dwarf?'”

As Vanderburg called attention to, planets are accepted to possibly be fit for supporting life on the off chance that they exist in a “habitable zone” — that is, sufficiently close to an offered star to profit by its warmth yet not all that nearby that the warmth disposes of the conditions important to help life.

“In a white dwarf system there’s also a habitable zone, but because the white dwarf is really tiny and it’s cooling off and is really, really faint, you have to huddle a lot closer to that star in order for it to be potentially habitable,” Vanderburg told Salon.

In the event that the cosmologists’ ongoing discovery works out, it “is essentially telling us how they can do that.”