An illustration of a giant orange star eating a much smaller red planet and a giant burst of bright white dust expanding outward from the tiny planet. Dust blasts into space as a star (illustrated) swallows a planet about 10 times the mass of Jupiter.
\n\u00a0
\nA dusty belch is all that remains of a planet that was gobbled up by a star about 12,000 light-years away. It marks the first time anyone has seen a star in the act of eating a planet.
\nA brief burst of light captured by a couple of telescopes was probably caused by a planet about 10 times the mass of Jupiter being swallowed by its sun, researchers report May 3 in Nature. It\u2019s a dramatic end that is the eventual destiny of many planets, including Earth.
\nThe best of Science News – direct to your inbox. Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your email inbox every Thursday.
\n\u201cPlanetary engulfment has been predicted for a very long time, but their frequency was not well known,\u201d says MIT astrophysicist Kishalay De. \u201cSo it was certainly exciting to realize we had found one.\u201d
\nThe discovery came about as De was on the hunt for binary stars. He was using data from the Palomar Observatory in California to look for spots in the sky that showed rapid increases in brightness. Such fluctuations can be a sign of stars coming close enough together that one will suck matter from the other (SN: 2\/6\/14).
\nOne event from 2020 stood out. A spot of light rapidly got about 100 times as bright as it had been. It could have been the result of two stars merging. But a second look by NASA\u2019s NEOWISE infrared space telescope suggested otherwise. Data from that observatory showed that the total amount of energy released in the flash was just one-thousandth what it would have been if two stars had merged, and that chilly dust surrounded the mash-up instead of hot plasma that would normally indicate a merger among stars.
\nThe low energy suggested that one of the objects, assuming it was a merger of some kind, wasn\u2019t a star at all. Instead, it was probably a giant planet. As the star noshed on the planet, a stream of cold dust sailed away like cosmic breadcrumbs from a stellar snack. \u201cI was indeed surprised when we connected the dots together,\u201d De says.
\nPlanet-devouring stars are probably relatively common in the universe, says UCLA astrophysicist Smadar Naoz, who was not involved with the study. But the evidence, she says, has been circumstantial. Until now, astronomers have seen only signs of stars preparing for a planetary snack or debris left over from a presumed stellar meal.
\n\u201cOne of the things that I found in the paper that I really liked was the detective work\u201d that pieced together evidence from multiple telescopes to confirm that the star expanded outward to eat a planet, Naoz says.
\nNaoz has pondered the ways that stars might gobble up planets. A star in the prime of life might consume a planet that wanders too close by in its orbit \u2014 think of that as a stellar lunch, Naoz says. A dying star, on the other hand, will swallow a planet as the star swells to become a red giant (SN: 4\/7\/20). That\u2019s more like a cosmic dinner.
\nThe planet-eating star in this study is turning into a red giant, but is still early in its transformation. \u201cI would say it\u2019s early supper,\u201d Naoz says.
\nThere\u2019s a lot that\u2019s still mysterious about stars munching on planets, De says. But upcoming observatories with large infrared cameras, he says, should let astronomers look for bright, long-lived infrared emissiosn that might reveal more planet-eating stars.
\nOur sun will evolve into a red giant and consume the Earth in about 5 billion years. \u201cBecause the Earth is much smaller than Jupiter,\u201d De says, \u201cthe effects will certainly be more subdued \u2026 so finding Earth-like engulfments will be challenging, but we are actively working on ideas to identify them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An illustration of a giant orange star eating a much smaller red planet and a giant burst of bright white dust expanding outward from the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6530,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}