It’s the End of a World as We Know It

NYT SCIENCE: It’s the End of a World as We Know It
By Becky Ferreira
Section: Science
Source: New York Times
Published Date: May 3, 2023 at 03:00AM

Astronomers spotted a dying star swallowing a large planet, a discovery that fills in a “missing link” in understanding the fates of Earth and many other planets.

Astronomers have witnessed a star gobbling up a planet, offering the first direct glimpse of a gnarly process called planetary engulfment that most likely awaits Earth in the deep future. Scientists serendipitously spotted a gas planet — like Jupiter but possibly larger — as it was swallowed up by an aging sun-like star about 12,000 light-years from Earth. Tantalizing hints of engulfment events have been spotted in the past, but nobody has ever caught a star in the act of devouring a planet until now. The discovery “provides a missing link in our understanding of the evolution and final fates of planetary systems,” including the one we inhabit, the astronomers wrote in their study, which was published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. “This is the eventual fate of the Earth,” said Kishalay De, a NASA Einstein fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the study’s authors. “We are really seeing what the Earth is going to run into five billion years from now.” The life cycles of stars are linked to their masses. Small stars, like red dwarfs, may shine for trillions of years, whereas the most massive stars explode just a few million years after their births. As stars like the sun start to die after billions of years, they transform into a class called red giants that expand hundreds of times in size, consuming anything within their advancing borders.

Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/science/star-eating-planet.html

Star seen swallowing planet in one big gulp. For the first time, scientists have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet — not just a nibble or bite, but one big gulp. It's a preview of what will happen to Earth when our sun morphs into a red giant. (Caltech/IPAC animation)