White dwarf star covering itself with the atmosphere of a hot Neptune

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From Ars Technica:
"White dwarfs are the cores of stars that were once similar to the Sun. At some point, these stars have exhausted the lighter elements that fueled their earlier existence, flared up into a bloated red giant, and burned down into carbon and oxygen rich cores not much larger than the Earth (but far more massive). With fusion shut down, they gradually radiate away the remaining temperature, fading out of our ability to detect them.

We now know that a large number of stars have planets around them. So what happens to a planet orbiting a star that puffs up on its way to becoming a white dwarf? Some hints of that have come from a number of these stars that have material similar to that of a rocky planet embedded in their surface. But a new example has been found with gas that has been drawn off from a Neptune-like planet."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/12 ... exoplanet/

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Here's another article on CNN:

What this giant evaporating planet tells us about Earth's future
"(CNN) - Stars live violent lives, and the planets around them don't always survive their brutal phases. But for the first time, astronomers have found evidence of a planet that survived a star's transition to death."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/04/world/gi ... index.html

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