A dead star may have given birth to a brand-new planet

Doctoral student Jamie Williams at the University of Warwick was re-reading Hubble observations from 1999 when she noticed something odd: a strange niobium fingerprint around a white dwarf — the ember of a star that died long ago. The best explanation is almost poetic: the star's expelled remains coalesced into a Jupiter-sized, second-generation planet, still orbiting its dead parent at a scorching 6 million kilometres. Published in Nature Astronomy, it's a reminder that even stellar death might be a first chapter.