WASHINGTON: Billions of years from now, the sun is expected to run out of fuel and greatly expand into what is called a red giant, eventually shedding its outer layers and leaving behind its dense core, a white dwarf. Some of the planets in our solar system would be destroyed while others might survive.

Researchers have now spotted a white dwarf with planetary debris swirling around it in an unusual configuration that may offer a peek into one possible outcome for our solar system in the distant future.

Unlike in similar systems previously observed, the debris disc surrounding this white dwarf appears to consist of two distinct rings. The researchers said the disc may have been shaped by two planetary or smaller rocky bodies that are embedded in the rings after managing to survive the star’s violent death throes.

The white dwarf, named J13281450, is located in the Milky Way roughly 1,600 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Virgo. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year 9.5 trillion km. The observations were made using the European Southern Observatory’s Chile-based Very Large Telescope.

Prior to this discovery, astronomers had identified 21 white dwarfs with debris surrounding them, all of which had a single disc and not a double ring of material as the new observations reveal. “It shows that the remnants of a planetary system can have a much more complex structure than we previously thought, and provides further support to the idea that planetary rocky bodies may survive the transformation of a star into a white dwarf,” said astronomer Felipe Lagos-Vilches of Universidad Tcnica Federico Santa Maria in Chile, one of the authors of the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The white dwarf has a mass about 47pc that of the sun, jam-packed into a diameter roughly the same as that of Earth.

Published in Dawn, November 8th, 2026