Star gulps an entire planet, gives 1st glimpse of Earth’s fate when Sun runs out of fuel

 In what is being described as a galactic gobble, for the first time, astronomers have seen a star devouring a planet bigger than Earth. The aging star swallowed the planet as it was running out of fuel in its core, growing in size and shrinking the gap with its neighboring planet.

The new observations paint a picture of the situation that could one day happen in our own Solar System when the Sun begins to run out of fuel and its size expands, consuming the inner planets Mercury, Venus, and even Earth.

This galactic feast happened between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago near the Aquila constellation when the star was around 10 billion years old. As the planet went down the stellar hatch, there was a swift hot outburst of light, followed by a long-lasting stream of dust shining brightly in cold infrared energy, the researchers said.

The star was in the early stages of what is called the red giant phase late in its lifespan as it depleted hydrogen fuel in its core. The star started out the same as our Sun and is located in our Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years from Earth. Red giant stars can swell to a hundred times their original diameter, engulfing any planets in their way.

“This type of event has been predicted for decades, but until now we have never actually observed how this process plays out,” Kishalay De, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and the study’s lead author, said in a statement.

The team used NEOWISE or the Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft to observe the event as the planet likely the size of Jupiter was devoured. It took additional observations and data-crunching to unravel the mystery: Instead of a star gobbling up its companion star, this one had devoured its planet.

The planet in this research was a type called a “hot Jupiter” – a gas giant resembling our solar system’s biggest world but with an orbit much tighter to its star. This planet, perhaps a few times bigger than Jupiter, orbited its star in less than a day at a distance closer than Mercury, our innermost planet, orbits the sun.

“This planet doesn’t go out without a fight. Even before it is engulfed whole, our data provide evidence that the planet tries to rip out the star’s surface layers with its own gravity. But the star happens to be a thousand times more massive, so the planet can’t do much and eventually take the plunge,” De added.

Astronomers don’t know if more planets are circling this star at a safer distance. If so, De said they may have thousands of years before becoming the star’s second or third course.

Researchers are now on the lookout for more such cosmic gulps.

This was first published in India Today

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