Perhaps the luckiest planet in the Milky Way lives about 6,500 light-years away, toward the center of our galaxy: a large, gassy world that narrowly escaped being obliterated by its dying home star.

Astronomers spotted the system, described today in the science journal Nature, when the planet and its star distorted background starlight. The faraway, fortunate Jupiter-size world is circling a tiny stellar corpse—a dim white dwarf star about the size of Earth that was once much like the sun. As that star aged, it expanded into a red giant before collapsing into the dense white dwarf—a process that can easily destroy orbiting planets.

“It would have been very easy to lose this planet,” says Caltech’s Juliette Becker,