“Astronomers Witness Planet Being Consumed by Dying Star in Real Time”

They circled around each other for billions of years, but the end came in a few months. The aging star began to run out of hydrogen fuel in its core and began to increase in size until it grew large enough to engulf a nearby planet about the size of Jupiter.

It happened twelve thousand light years from Earth some ten to fifteen thousand years ago. Therefore, only in 2020 could astronomers see a dazzling flash which the demise of the planet evoked. And for the next year, they found out what they had actually recorded. The results of your research now they published in the journal Nature.

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The researchers made their breakthrough while looking for something quite different. Kishalay De, a postgraduate researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of the study, was searching for merging stars, so-called red novae, at California’s Palomar Observatory. written by the New York Times (NYT). But suddenly a flash of visible light appeared in the data, which the astronomer spent a year trying to figure out.

“One night I noticed a star that had suddenly brightened a hundred times over the course of a week. It was unlike any starburst I have ever seen in my life.” described De’s sightings to CNN.

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According to the astronomer, a finished detective story followed. “To identify the flash, his team obtained visible light observations of the source captured in November 2020 by the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii. These images revealed a star cooling to about five thousand degrees Fahrenheit, about ten times less than the heat expected for red novae,” the NYT wrote. Surprised, De and his team therefore observed the star again, this time in infrared light using a different camera again at the Palomar Observatory and also with the help of NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope.

In the infrared spectrum, which is ideal for seeing objects that do not emit much energy, the star shone brightly. And it dawned on the researchers that they were most likely observing a star eating a planet in real time. “At first I just didn’t believe it. We have already seen the state before and after planetary absorption, but these observations give us the first insight into how the whole process takes place in real time,” the researcher told the NYT.

The research could mark one of the breakthroughs in astronomical research thanks to new possibilities that will give scientists more accessible tools for observing in the infrared spectrum. “Historically, it has been very difficult to get this infrared data because infrared detectors have been very expensive and it is difficult to build large cameras that can repeatedly scan the sky. But we are on the threshold of an infrared revolution in astronomy. In the coming decade, several facilities will go into operation that we hope will make it possible to find such events repeatedly. And that, I hope, will allow us to further expand our knowledge,” De indicated to CNN.

Scientists will now know better what to look for. “The key signatures we identified include the long-lasting infrared emission that follows the flash of visible light. We hope that with the large infrared observation instruments that we should have available soon, we will be able to use the infrared emissions as a tool to identify every planet that is currently being absorbed in our galaxy,” the astronomer told American news television.

Illustration of the first observed absorption of a planet by a star.Source: Caltech/IPAC

Astrophysicist Lorenzo Spina from the observatory in Padua, Italy, who deals with planetary absorption, described the team’s conclusions as very solid to the NYT, according to him, it is a breakthrough discovery. “It’s a very important missing piece of the whole story. Now we will have a much better understanding of the whole absorption process,” Spina said.

Even as astronomers look at the destruction of worlds, they can gain a variety of insights. The New York Times believes that one only has to look around its cosmic neighborhood in the Milky Way. “It is littered with signs of similar absorption events. The light of some stars is polluted by the chemical signatures of planets, suggesting that entire worlds are being eaten before our eyes.

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Scientists have also noted hundreds of planets with small orbits that are doomed to fall into the action radio of red giants in the future. Such incredible events can shed light on a whole host of juicy mysteries, including the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe. Starlight containing the chemical signatures of planetary debris can be mined for clues to the internal composition of worlds in other systems. Building an inventory of these constituents can help estimate the number of star systems with the right substances to support habitable environments,” the paper pointed out.

Eating star

The conclusions of the study were also praised by astrophysicist Carole Hasweelová from the British Open University. She did not participate in this research, but in 2010 she led a team that, with the help of Hubble telescope found the WASP-12 star feeding on its planets. She colorfully described the differences in the research results. “This is devouring of a different kind. This star swallowed an entire planet in one gulp. “In contrast, WASP-12b and other hot Jupiters we’ve previously studied are very gently licked and nibbled.” she wrote scientist to the American station PBS in an e-mail.

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Britain’s Daily Telegraph si noticedthat the team’s scientific findings are a key breakthrough in understanding planetary dynamics, but represent ominous news for Mercury, Venus and probably Earth too. “I think there is something very remarkable about these results and it speaks to the transience of our existence. After the billions of years of existence that our solar system will last, the last phase of our existence will probably also end with a last flash that will last only a few months,” study co-author Ryan Lau told the paper.

In an article accompanying the release of the study, UCLA astronomer Smadar Naoz said that “gravitational interactions between a star and a planet in a close orbit can also slowly bring the planet to extinction. When a star runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core, it begins to expand and become a sub-giant. At this stage, it will begin to absorb its nearby planets – in a few billion years, our Sun will also go through this process,” the researcher described, adding that further observations of planetary absorption will be needed to better understand similar events and find out what leads to them.