A planet may have been born from the ashes of a dead star

Jamie Williams, a doctoral student at the University of Warwick, was studying a white dwarf — the cooling cinder of a star that already died — 270 light-years away when something odd caught her eye: traces of niobium, a rare metal, on the star's surface. Her team's explanation, published in Nature Astronomy, is extraordinary: the dead star may have just given birth to a brand-new giant planet from its own debris — the first 'second-generation' planet ever spotted. If follow-up telescope time confirms it, planets can form long after their star dies, and could stay habitable for tens of billions of years.