Bleak Future: Astronomers see a star devour a planet for the first time, the same fate that awaits Earth
For the first time, astronomers in the United States observed what happens when a star swallows a planet. The dying star, which was discovered in the Milky Way galaxy roughly 12,000 light years from Earth, swallowed a planet about 11 times bigger than the Earth.
A team of astronomers in the United States have for the first time observed what happens when a star swallows a planet. The dying star, was discovered in the Milky Way galaxy roughly 12,000 light years from Earth, swallowed a planet about 11 times bigger than the Earth.
Astronomers and astrophysicists have for a long time said that the Earth would be swallowed whole by the Sun someday, about 5 billion years from now. While that has been a proven theory for a long time, up until recently, no scientist had the faintest clue of what that would actually look like.
Recently, a team of astronomers in the United States revealed that they had observed one of the universe’s most devastating forces for the first time: a dying star that had grown tremendously into a red giant and killed a planet that happened to be nearby.
Scientists think that most planets are destroyed when their host star expends all of its available energy and begins to die by growing into a red giant. It is the ultimate stage of a star’s stellar development, and the star dies fiercely, taking everything around it with it into its cosmic tomb.
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However, according to broadcaster France 24, MIT’s Kishalay De, this one developed like a “detective story.”
“It all started about three years ago when I was looking through data from the Zwicky Transient Facility survey, which takes images of the sky every night,” De said. He saw a star that had increased its brightness 100 times in only ten days in this seemingly random kaleidoscope of pictures, he continued.
A closer look, particularly with NASA’s infrared satellite observatory NEOWISE, revealed that the dying star, which was discovered in the Milky Way galaxy roughly 12,000 light years from Earth, had eaten a gas giant the size of Jupiter that had been circling it. They estimated that the complete procedure would take roughly 100 days.
The brilliant last explosion De witnessed the final ten days of the planet’s life as it was completely subsumed by the red giant in the night sky images he studied.
Given that the now-destroyed planet was around 11 times the size of Earth, scientists do not anticipate our home planet to put up much of a fight when it is destroyed by the Sun in roughly five billion years.
“After the billions of years that span the lifetime of our solar system, our own end stages will likely conclude in a final flash that lasts only a few months,” said Ryan Lau, one of De’s study partners, adding that their results “speak to the transience of our existence.”
People, on the other hand, are unlikely to live to see our fate, as the Sun’s expansion into its own red giant form will have long rendered our planet a dry, inhospitable wasteland.
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