A white dwarf is what remains when a star like the sun dies. After burning through its fuel, the star swells into a red giant, sheds its outer layers, and leaves behind a hot, Earth-sized core that slowly cools over billions of years. More than 95 percent of all stars will end this way.

Planets that formed alongside the star can sometimes survive this upheaval if their orbits are wide enough. Astronomers have observed a handful of such "first-generation" survivors around white dwarfs. What they had never seen — until the newly reported study of HS 0209+0832 — is a "second-generation" planet: a world that formed after the star died.

The evidence is chemical. The white dwarf's atmosphere contains niobium and other heavy elements at more than 1,000 times the sun's levels. These elements are made inside dying stars during their bloated red giant phase. Their presence in the planet's material suggests the world condensed from a disk of the star's own debris.

Astronomers believe a companion star may have been needed to pull the ejected material into a disk. The discovery hints that after our sun dies, new planets could still emerge in our solar system.

Reporting based on: kioncentralcoast.com, phys.org.