When a star like the Sun runs out of fuel it swells, sheds its outer layers and collapses into a white dwarf: an Earth-sized cinder, no fuel left, glowing for billions of years on stored heat alone. Anything that survives the swelling is left circling a corpse. This catalogue contains two such planets, and both were found by watching what little light the dead star still gives off.
How picked
Picked automatically from the current data: every planet whose host is a white dwarf, hottest cinder first.
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host 10,393 K
WD 0806-661 b
WD 0806-661 · 10,393 K · DQModelled
Its sun is a white dwarf: an Earth-sized cinder of a burnt-out star, still glowing at 10,393 K off leftover heat with no fuel left to burn. The planet's modelled colour comes from that dying light: bright water clouds scatter most of the starlight straight back.
Its sun is a white dwarf: an Earth-sized cinder of a burnt-out star, still glowing at 4,710 K off leftover heat with no fuel left to burn. The planet's modelled colour comes from that dying light: methane in its cold air absorbs the red end of the spectrum, leaving blue-green.
⚠ ABOUT THIS SWATCHThis colour falls outside the range a screen can display — the swatch is the closest your screen can get.
Only two, and that is the honest number rather than a shortage of curation. Hotter stellar remnants are excluded from this catalogue on purpose — their light is mostly ultraviolet, where a reflected visible colour would mean nothing. And the pulsar planets, the first exoplanets ever discovered back in 1992, cannot appear at all: a pulsar is a neutron star, and there is no ordinary starlight there to reflect.
HOW THESE 2 WERE PICKED
Picked automatically from the current data: every planet whose host is a white dwarf, hottest cinder first.