A planet rose from the ashes of its own dead star — and astronomers just found it

Most planets are born alongside their stars, from the same cloud of dust and gas. But a team led by the University of Warwick has spotted something stranger: a giant world orbiting a dead star — a white dwarf, the collapsed core left behind when a star runs out of fuel — that appears to have formed from the material that same star cast off as it died. The evidence is chemical: the star's atmosphere carries zinc, copper, and niobium (never before seen in a white dwarf) at levels no ordinary first-generation planet could explain. Published in Nature Astronomy, it's the first suspected 'second-generation' planet around a white dwarf — a world that rose, phoenix-like, from its star's remains.