TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – A bintang devoured planets 12,000 light years away, then ejected dust left over by belching. The brief flash of light was caught by several telescopes as the planet with the mass of about 10 Jupiters was swallowed up by its sun.
Research journal article”An Infrared Transient from a Star Engulfing a Planet” dated May 3, 2023 at nature.com marks the first time anyone has ever seen a star eating a planet. It was a dramatic ending that would probably be fateful for many planets, including Earth.
According to an astrophysicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kishalay De, the swallowing event planet has been predicted for a long time, but its frequency has not been well known.
The findings this time came when De was hunting for binary stars. He used data from the Palomar Observatory in California to look for points in the sky that show a rapid increase in brightness. Such fluctuations in light could be a sign of two astronomical objects approaching each other, then one of the objects sucking matter from the other.
Similar Phenomenon Merging Stars
There is a similar phenomenon in 2020. The point of light quickly becomes 100 times brighter than before. It could be the result of two stars merging. However, further observations by NASA’s NEOWISE infrared space telescope suggest otherwise.
Observatory data show that the total amount of energy released in the flash is only one-thousandth of what would occur if two stars merged. The low energy also indicates that one of the objects in the event is not a star, but a giant planet.
In addition, the cold dust surrounding the melt is usually present as an indication of mergers between stars, not hot plasma. Meanwhile, when a star devours a planet, streams of cold dust will sail like cosmic bread crumbs from the star’s snack.
About Planet Eater Stars
Planet-eating stars may be relatively common in the universe, said Smadar Naoz, another astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles. However, this cannot be proven directly. Astronomers only see signs of stars that are preparing to devour planets or the debris left over from the star’s leftover meal.
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It takes a bunch of evidence from various telescopes and research results to confirm that a star really expands and devours planets. Naoz himself has pondered how stars do this. A star in the prime of life might eat a planet that wanders too close in its orbit to think it’s the star’s lunch. Conversely, a dying star swallows a planet as it swells into a red giant, like dinner.
The planet-eating stars in De’s research are turning into red giants, but are still in the early stages of transformation. Naoz calls it an early dinner.
There is still much mystery about stars devouring planets. However, an upcoming observatory with a large infrared camera could help astronomers search for bright, long-lived emissions to reveal more planet-eating stars.
The sun in the solar system will evolve into a red giant and eat Earth in about 5 billion years. Since Earth is much smaller than Jupiter, the effect will inevitably be weaker. It’s hard to find Earth-like planet-devouring events, but Kishalay De and co. are actively working on ideas for their identification process.
Editor’s Choice: Been to the Observatory? The following is the definition and function
NIA HEPPY | SYAHDI MUHARRAM
2023-05-11 01:14:00
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