A Suspected Planet Orbiting a Dead Star, in Hubble's Archive

Astronomers going back through the Hubble data archive have reopened what NASA calls a cold case: unusual chemical abundances in a system named HS 0209+0832. The possible explanation NASA offers — shown as an artist's concept rather than a photograph — is a second-generation planet orbiting a white dwarf star. A world circling the remnant of a dead star is a strange enough idea that the hedge matters: this is a hypothesis about data already in hand, not a confirmed new image of a planet.