Study reveals Earth's fate when sun dies in 5 billion years

Five billion years hence, our sun will exhaust its fuel, swell into a red giant consuming Mercury, Venus, and Earth, then collapse into a white dwarf — a fate now illuminated not by prophecy, but by science. Astronomers at the University of St Andrews, wielding the James Webb Space Telescope, have studied a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a stellar corpse 80 light-years away, finding in its survival and warmth a mirror of our solar system's distant end. The planet WD 1856 b should not exist so close to its dead star, yet it does — a cosmic anomaly that reveals how worlds can outlast the deaths o