Capitals - Saba: Astronomers have discovered an Earth-like planet four thousand light-years away in the Milky Way galaxy, offering an insight into the future of our solar system, billions of years from now.
According to media reports on Saturday, the planet is about 1.9 times the mass of the Earth, and orbits its star at a distance twice the distance between the Earth and the Sun, but this star is a white dwarf, which means that any life that may have existed on the outer planet was eliminated before or during the star's destructive red giant phase.
The discovery is intriguing, as it is like a peek into the future of the solar system and the fate of Earth, once the sun dies and completes its evolution into a white dwarf.
Stars that run out of hydrogen fuel for fusion in their nuclei become less stable and swell to an enormous size. This is the red giant stage.
Eventually, the star will eject all of its outer matter, and the core will collapse under gravity to form a dense body, its bright light generated not by fusion, but by the residual heat from its collapse. This hot core is a white dwarf, and it will take trillions of years for it to cool to complete darkness.
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