Mystery of a Warm Planet Orbiting a Dead Star Deepens

Eighty light-years from Earth, a Jupiter-sized planet orbits the cold remnant of a dead star — and yet it burns with an inexplicable warmth, hundreds of degrees hotter than physics alone can explain. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have peered into its atmosphere and found methane, haze, and a carbon-rich chemistry that speaks to a turbulent, billion-year journey inward. The planet should be frozen in the silence of a dying system; instead, it poses one of the oldest questions science knows — where does unexpected life, or its likeness, come from? In the fate of this world, w