In a shard of galactic archaeology that offers a less-than-inviting hint at our own future, astronomers have discovered a chunk of a former planet orbiting the remains of its former star, now a smoldering cinder known as a white dwarf.

The fragment, made mostly of iron, nickel and other metals, lies 410 light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. It could be a mile, or hundreds of miles, in diameter, but to be dense enough to have survived the explosive demise and subsequent evolution of its host star, it likely was part of a large planet with a wider more distant orbit. Now it circles the white dwarf so closely that it completes an orbit every 123 minutes.

“The fact that we have discovered a body orbiting on a two-hour period is clear evidence that a planetary body can survive this destructive process,” said Christopher Manser, a physicist at the University of Warwick in England, and the leader of an international team that reported their results in Science on Thursday.

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A white dwarf is the end product left behind when a star as large as the sun or slightly bigger runs out of fuel, expires and eventually shrinks into a dense ember about the size of Earth. The universe is littered with these dense, cooling tombstones.