Photo: Aperture Vintage | Unsplash
In a scientific first, astronomers observed a star swallowing a planet as part of its dying process. The researchers first spotted the outburst, which took place about 12,000 light-years away from Earth, in 2020, but it took several years for them to figure out what it was: a star running out of fuel, swelling to “a million times its original size,” and engulfing everything around it, including a nearby planet. The team used an infrared camera to look at the star, finding that the amount of energy expelled during the outburst indicated a planet, about the size of Jupiter, crashing into its star. “That infrared data made me fall off my chair,” said Kishalay De, the lead author of the study outlining the findings. Scientists predict that in about 5 billion years, Earth will undergo this same phenomenon when our sun runs out of fuel.
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