In this amazing article in June 2009's Scientific American, stars and their extrasolar planets are revealed. We learn about the different types of stars - white dwarfs and brown dwarfs in particular, and we see that when supernovae occur, these affect the orbiting bodies, leaving corpses of solar systems in place, many still orbiting the still-magnetic remnant of the star. Some stars rise from ashes of their former selves, like the neutron star PSR 1257+12 (also known as PSR B1257+12). PSR 1257+12 is a pulsar, highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation.PSR B1257+12 is in the constellation of Virgo. The designation PSR B1257+12 refers to its coordinates in the B1950.0 epoch. It is located about 980 light years from Earth. As of 2007, it is confirmed that three extrasolar planets orbit the pulsar.
Scientific American calls PSR 1257+12 a "Phoenix from the Ashes," explaining:
It packs a mass greater than the sun’s into the size of a small asteroid, some 20 kilometers across. The event that created this beast, the supernova explosion of a star 20 times the mass of the sun, was more violent than the demise of a sunlike star, and it is hard to imagine planets surviving it. Moreover, the star that exploded probably had a radius larger than 1 AU (astronomical unit, the Earth-sun distance), which is larger than the orbits of the planets we see today. For both reasons, those planets must have risen up out of the ashes of the explosion.
Read the article at Scientific American, and if you want to know more about stars, here are some wikipedia links:
Star
White Dwarf
Yellow Dwarf (our Sun)
Red Dwarf
Black Dwarf
Brown Dwarf
Red supergiant
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