Astronomers Witness a Star Eating a Planet for the First Time

In the vast universe full of mysterious phenomena, astronomers have unveiled an unbelievable discovery, sending awe into the scientific community. For the first time, astronomers saw a star eating up a planet.

This shocking event took place in a faraway solar system. It sheds new light on the complexity of stars and planets’ interactions, challenging our beliefs on the formation of celestial bodies.

Not only does the discovery gives us a new understanding, but it also sheds light on the fate of Earth billions of years from now. The study was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A Rare Event

Scientists have known that stars devour planets. But they have never witnessed a star doing the deed until now.

Scientists just caught a star eating an entire planet: I t’s a gloomy preview of what will happen to Earth when our sun morphs into a red giant and gobbles the four inner planets https://t.co/LbujbnPAgZ

— TIME (@TIME) May 3, 2023

Kishalay De, lead author of the research and astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said, “Honestly, one of the biggest surprises for me was that we found it in the first place.”

She added, “Planetary engulfment has been a fundamental prediction in our understanding of stars and planets, but their frequency has been very uncertain. So finding a potentially rare event for the first time is always exciting.”

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A Burst of Radiation

The researchers discovered the event by studying a radiation burst named ZTF SLRN-2020. It happened in 2020 at the Milky Way’s disk, around 12,000 light-years far from Earth.

During the phenomenon, a star beamed 100 times more over a week. De said, “The work started back in 2020 when I was not looking for this type of event, actually. I was looking for a much more common outburst called novae.”

A Planet Crashing into Its Star

Depending on the outburst’s nature, the astronomers estimated the event released hydrogen equivalent to 33 times more than the Earth’s mass, about 0.33 of Earth’s dust.

NEWS 🚨: Astronomers witnessed a star eating a planet for the first time.

As the Jupiter-sized planet was ingested into the star's core, the star grew bigger and 100 times as bright, eventually going back to normal once the planet was 'digested.' pic.twitter.com/0uAuxRDncD

— StarTalk (@StarTalkRadio) May 4, 2023

Based on this, they suggest the progenitor star was estimated at 0.8 to 1.5 times the sun’s mass. In addition, the devoured planet was about 1 to 10 times Jupiter’s mass.

De said, “That means that whatever merged with the star has to be 1,000 times smaller than any other star we’ve seen.”

The author added, “And it’s a happy coincidence that the mass of Jupiter is about one-thousandth the mass of the sun. That’s when we realized this planet was crashing into its star.”

Earth’s Fate

Earth will face the same fate when the sun becomes a red giant in almost 5 billion years. As the stars and sun near the end of their lives, they start to burst their main fuel source. It is the hydrogen within their cores.

It condenses its cores, and its outer surface cools and expands. During this “red Giant” phase, these stars may surge out anywhere from 100 to 1000 times their average diameter, thus, swallowing close orbiting planets.

De said, “We know that this must happen to all planets that are orbiting at distances smaller than the Earth’s, but it was considered extremely challenging to provide experimental evidence for this.”

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This discovery sparks many questions. De asked, “Did the planet survive the plunge, or did it get annihilated into the stellar material during the plunge?”

“If I was sitting on a planet 10,000 light years away, I would basically see a similar flash of light from the solar system — a bit subdued compared to this one because the Earth is much less massive than a planet like Jupiter, which is what we believe was involved in this event — which puts the significance of this discovery into a human perspective.”

De explained that future research on the same events would be feasible with better knowledge of how a planetary engulfment concedes. This is more possible considering how infrared surveys have become more widespread.

In addition, researchers can further observe this particular star system. They can identify if the planet polluted the star or if the eruption caused it to spin around.

The data from this groundbreaking discovery can also be a starting point for theories aiming to know how planets affect their host stars.