Solid, low-mass planets have best chance to survive parent star's death

From Fox News.com (May 20):

When stars about the sun's size swell into red giants and finally dwindle into white dwarfs, their planets may be kicked out of the system or consumed. New work suggests that planets that are solid all the way through and have low masses may have the best chance of surviving the surge of tugs produced by their parent stars' deaths.

Scientists refer to the difference in gravitational strength between two points, like a star and a planet, or the Earth and the moon, as a tidal force. When this tidal force shifts because of changes in one body's gravitational influence, some companions hold up okay — but others fall apart.

Astrophysicist Dimitri Veras at the University of Warwick led a team to outline a procedure for computing the tidal forces between a near-spherical solid planet and a white dwarf, the type of stellar corpse leftover by the smaller stars in the universe, like the sun. The Royal Astronomical Society recently published a statement about the new work. [read more]

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