A planet that formed after its star died has turned up in decades-old telescope data.
A team of scientists says it found evidence of a second-generation planet, one built from the debris of a white dwarf, the dense, burned-out core a star leaves behind once it runs out of fuel. The discovery did not come from a new observation. It surfaced in a re-examination of decades-old Hubble Space Telescope data that had been sitting in the archive. Hubble photographed the system long before anyone went looking for this particular signal.
If the finding holds up, it is a reminder that planet formation does not necessarily stop when a star dies. A white dwarf's violent transition can apparently still leave behind enough material to build something new, not just debris.
Call it the universe's version of recycling: Hubble keeps mining fresh discoveries out of old files, three and a half decades after launch, while flashier telescopes get the press releases.