A star near the constellation Aquila in the Milky Way swelled up and engulfed a planet in too close an orbit.
For the first time, scientists have observed a planet being swallowed up by a dying star. According to the hypothesis of astronomers, the same fate awaits the Earth in about 5 billion years, when the Sun ends its stellar life and goes into the state of a red giant.
This is stated in the article published Wednesday, May 3, in Nature.
According to the study’s lead author, MIT astrophysicist Kishalay De, astronomers have seen the effects of planetary takeovers and their implications before, but this time, for the first time, “a star was caught red-handed” during the process itself.
In May 2020, Kishalay De observed with a special camera at the Caltech Observatory a star that suddenly became 100 times brighter than it was, and shone like that for 10 days. This star is located in our galaxy, about 12,000 light years from the Sun.
A star like the Sun released an amount of energy that was 1,000 times less than expected in a merger.
“What merged with the star must have been 1,000 times smaller than any other star we have seen. Then we realized: it was a planet that crashed into its star,” Kishalay De explained.
The end of this planet was very fast, according to the researchers, as the planet was in a very close orbit. After the reaction, the star threw clouds of dust and gas into interstellar space, which then cooled.
According to Morgan McLeod, co-author of the study and an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the planet’s takeover went smoothly. Later, scientists saw that the star slowly returned to its previous size.
Astronomers have calculated that such events can occur several times a year in the Milky Way, which has more than 100 billion stars.
“It is likely that now that we have recorded such an event, we will observe many others, and all these events will help us better understand the future of the solar system,” the researchers note.
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