Destruction in the Galaxy: Astronomers Detect a Star Immediately Swallowing a Planet | Sciences

For the first time, scientists have captured a star simultaneously swallowing a planet. The new observations were revealed by astronomers, on Wednesday (3), in a study published in the journal “Nature”.

According to scientists, the planet in question was a gas giant the size of Jupiter – or even larger. The star is similar to the Sun and was swelling with age for several eons, until it finally became so large that it swallowed the planet near its orbit.

While there had been previous signs of other stars destroying planets, this was the first time that devouring itself had been observed, according to the study.

Scientists point out that the observed phenomenon is a grim preview of what will happen to Earth when our sun turns into a red giant star that engulfs our planet.

And according to scientists, this “Hungarian dinner”:

MIT researcher Keshalai Dee discovered the luminous burst in 2020 while reviewing sky surveys conducted by the Palomar Observatory at Caltech in the US. It took more observations and data analysis to unravel the mystery: instead of the star consuming its companion star, the star devoured its own planet.

Carol Haswell, an astrophysicist at Britain’s Open University, who was not involved in the research, said the findings were “very plausible”. Haswell led a team in 2010 that used the Hubble Space Telescope to identify the star. WASP-12 devouring a planet.

But this is a different kind of nutrition. Haswell said in an email that this star swallowed an entire planet at once. “In contrast, WASP-12 b and the other ‘Jupiter’ planets we studied previously are being gently licked and nibbled.”

Astronomers don’t know if more planets orbit this star at a safer distance. But if this happens, Kechalay said the star will have to wait a few thousand years before making a second or third bite.

Now that they know what to look for, researchers will be looking for more cosmic dinners. They even suspect that thousands of planets around other stars will suffer the same fate as this one, and eventually our solar system as well.

“Everything we see around us, everything we build around us, will disappear in the blink of an eye,” Kechalay said.