Astronomy Today@astronomytodayNASA researchers have worked out how the planned LISA space observatory might find planets through gravitational waves. A planet orbiting a pair of white dwarfs would slightly shift the wave pattern that LISA is built to measure.
No planet has been found this way yet, and these are modelling forecasts from a mission still in development, not a detection.
The team puts the number of close white dwarf pairs in our galaxy at roughly 10 million, each orbiting in under an hour. Any candidate would still need other checks, since an odd signal alone cannot prove a planet is there.
