White Dwarf Stars Could Create Surprisingly Common Long Lived Habitable Zones

When most stars like the Sun die, they don’t go out with a bang, they fade away as white dwarf stars, Earth-sized remnants that slowly cool over billions of years. For decades, it was thought these stellar corpses were poor candidates for hosting life because they cool predictably, giving any orbiting planets only brief windows in the “habitable zone” where liquid water could exist. But new research suggests this assumption may be fundamentally wrong.