Research reveals an enormous planet quickly orbiting a tiny, dying star

Thanks to a bevy of telescopes in space and on Earth--and even a pair of amateur astronomers in Arizona--a University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomer and his colleagues have discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting at breakneck speed around a distant white dwarf star. The system, about 80 light years away, violates all common conventions about stars and planets. The white dwarf is the remnant of a sun-like star, greatly shrunken down to roughly the size of Earth, yet it retains half the sun's ...