WD 1856 b is the only confirmed planet known to have survived the death of a Sun-like star. A Jupiter-size world orbiting a white dwarf, it was stumbled upon in 2020 when TESS surveyed roughly 2,000 white dwarfs hunting for comets and asteroids. It found a gas giant instead.
Now the James Webb Space Telescope has observed WD 1856 b directly, and the results deepen the mystery. White dwarfs are Earth-size carbon-oxygen remnants left after red-giant phases that typically destroy close-orbiting planets. That this one has a Jupiter-size companion intact is already an anomaly. What JWST found makes the system stranger still.
The full Nature study, co-authored by Cornell theoretical astrophysicist Christopher O'Connor, is worth reading for the mechanism: how a gas giant survives a red-giant expansion, migrates inward to a tight orbit around a dead star, and what that implies for planetary system survival rates around the billions of Sun-like stars winding down across the galaxy.
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