Astronomers Spot Star Potentially Swallowing Own Planet

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Facts

  • In a study published in Nature on Wednesday, a multi-university team of scientists revealed that they may have caught a star swallowing a planet in its orbit — a phenomenon that has not been directly observed before.1
  • The cosmic feast reportedly occurred in our own Milky Way galaxy, roughly 12K lightyears away, in the eagle-like constellation Aquila.2
  • Scientists believe the planet was a gas giant the size of Jupiter, which spiraled towards a dying star 1K times its size before being pulled into the star's core.3
  • Just after the 10B-year-old star engulfed its nearby planet, the scientists spotted an outburst of bright light — making the sun-like star more than 100 times brighter over just ten days before fading back to its normal state.4
  • MIT astrophysicist Kishalay De, lead author of the study, accidentally discovered the planetary demise in May 2020 while reviewing scans of the sky. It reportedly took additional observations and data-crunching to deduce the bright outburst was indeed a stellar merger.5
  • Scientists warn that a similar fate will befall the Earth when the sun is expected to expand rapidly near the end of its life. "If it's any consolation, this will happen in about 5 billion years," said study co-author Harvard astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod.6

Sources: 1Nature, 2ScienceDaily, 3Mashable India, 4Ars Technica, 5The Daily Beast, and 6PBS NewsHour.

Narratives

  • Narrative A, as provided by CNN. While astronomers have previously seen planets just before and after being engulfed by a star, this is the first time the act of consuming an entire planet has been observed. This discovery is exciting as it represents a missing link in astrophysics and can help better understand the full life cycle of stars.
  • Narrative B, as provided by Daily Mail. Astronomers speculate the combination of a white-hot flash followed by a colder, longer-lasting signal could only have been produced by a star engulfing a nearby planet. However, more data needs to be collected to reach a consistent and scientifically agreed-upon conclusion. This data is a clue about how stars behave but not the final verdict yet.

Predictions