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'More Might Be Out There': A Scorching Phoenix Planet May Solve a 3-Decade-Old Astronomical Cold Case

After being born of mostly just hydrogen and helium, a scant 14-ish billion years later the Universe is full of weird planets of wildly varying makes, shapes, and sizes.  Well, maybe not shapes, because they're all pretty rotund – it's in the definition of planet.  Yet some are truly alien, including oddballs as dense as iron and teeny-tiny 'next door neighbors' that make our modest Venus seem like a giant.  Upping the alien ante, astronomers have just announced a suspected exoplanet like no other entity, either in astronomy or in legend: a "phoenix planet" that arose not from its own ashes, but from those of its burned-out mother star.

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