“Astronomers Witness a Planet Swallowed by a Star – Possible Apocalypse Scenario via Sun’s Food Route”

CNN Indonesia

Friday, 12 May 2023 16:27 WIB

Jakarta, CNNIndonesia —

Scenario apocalypse via the Sun’s food route is possible. Experts see it happen to a planet in a distant galaxy.

Reported The Washington Posta team of experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and other institutions observed a planet the size of Jupiter.

The planet circled around a dead star a thousand times the size of the Sun in our galaxy before being swallowed up into the star’s core.

Quoted from the site WITHthe event of a star swallowing this planet occurs in the Solar System with a distance of 12 thousand light years in the constellation with an eagle-like shape, Aquilla.

The team discovered the burst from that incident in May 2020. However, it took astronomers another year to piece together an explanation for the explosion.

The initial signal in the search for data was taken by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory.

The ZTF is a survey that scans the sky for rapidly changing brightness stars whose patterns can be signs of supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and other stellar phenomena.

Scientists say the star grew large and 100 times brighter in just 10 days before fading. In the end, the starlight returned to normal after digesting the planet.

“One night, I saw a bright star with a factor of 100 for a week out of nowhere,” said Kishalay De, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at MIT.

“That was unlike any starburst I’ve ever seen in my life,” he continued.

Fate of the Earth

Observations of the ‘dying’ planet have given scientists a better understanding of the possible end of Earth. Many astronomers believe Earth will experience something similar billions of years from now. Namely, when the Sun starts to run out of energy and consumes the planets around it.

The problem is, experts have predicted that humans will no longer exist when a global level disaster might occur.

A sun that grows hotter, before dimming before its death, will likely pre-bake the Earth and make the environment uninhabitable.

“Somehow it’s poetic that all we see around us, everything in existence will burn up in the instant the Sun decides to evolve and swell in five billion years,” De said.

Although the future of Earth is somewhat bleak, scientists are amazed by this observation.

“Wow! That was my first reaction,” said Amanda Karakas, an astrophysicist at Monash University, Australia, who was not involved in the study.

“These observations really provide a clue as to what’s going to happen to our planets in our Solar System and Earth, in years away from now,” he said.

(lth)