WASHINGTON: In ancient mythology, the phoenix was a miraculous bird with a cyclical pattern of life and death, perishing in flames only to rise again from the ashes. Astronomers have now found a world that rightly can be called a phoenix planet.

Researchers said this exoplanet, as planets beyond our solar system are called, appears to have been born from material expelled into space during the death throes of a star a bit bigger than the sun, and now orbits the highly compact stellar remnant that was left behind, called a white dwarf.

It is classified as a second-generation planet, meaning it did not form from the swirling disk of material surrounding a newborn star, as Earth and other first-generation planets did, but rather from the leftovers of a doomed star. “This is the first example of a planet forming around a white dwarf,” said Jamie Williams, a doctoral student at the University of Warwick in England.

The white dwarf is located about 250 light-years from Earth, near the constellation Cetus. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion km. The planet is a gas giant perhaps slightly more massive than Jupiter. It orbits the white dwarf every 4.4 days at only 4pc the distance between Earth and the sun. It is so close that the blazingly hot white dwarf’s extreme ultraviolet radiation is causing the planet’s outer atmosphere to evaporate, with a portion then falling into the white dwarf.

Published in Dawn, October 7th, 2026