Astronomers have discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a distant dying dwarf star.
The planet, dubbed 'WD 1856 b' is located a whopping 80 light years away.
White dwarfs are the incredibly dense remains of sun-sized stars after they exhaust their nuclear fuel, shrunk down to roughly the size of Earth.
When a star dies it usually engulfs anything that surrounds it - making this particular situation highly unusual, according to Astronomy Now.
The planet is about seven times larger than the white dwarf and is completing one orbit every 34 hours - more than 60 times faster than Mercury.
The dying white dwarf was formed when a sun-like star neared the end of its life and expanded, blowing off its outer layers.
When this reaction eventually ground to a halt it caused the core to collapse, cramming much of the star’s mass into a smaller ball.
The Sun is expected to go through this process in around five billion years, consuming Mercury, Venus and even Earth in the process.
"It’s a pleasant surprise," lead researcher Andrew Vanderburg at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US told journal Nature.
"We’ve never seen evidence before of a planet coming in so close to a white dwarf and surviving.
“WD 1856 b somehow got very close to its white dwarf and managed to stay in one piece."
