An old star near the Aquila constellation witnessed a massive expansion that made it devour a planet close to it, AFP reported.
Astronomers had previously seen the before-and-after effects of this process. Kishalay De, a researcher at MIT, and the lead author of the new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, said “all we needed was to observe the star at that moment in case another planet witnesses a similar fate.” This is what awaits the Earth in around 5 billion years, when the Sun approaches its end as a yellow dwarf and expands to become a red giant. In the best-case scenario, its size and temperature would turn the Earth into a large fused rock. And, in the worst-case scenario, our planet will disappear completely.
It all started in May 2020, when Kishalay De observed, with a Caltech camera, a star that had suddenly increased in brightness by more than 100 times over a 10-day period. The star is in the Milky Way galaxy, around 12,000 light years from Earth.
First, De expected to observe a two-star system, where one star orbits the other, and the bigger star rips the atmosphere of the smaller one and emits light with every “gulp”.
The team of researchers from MIT, Harvard Smithsonian and Caltech established that “it looked like a merger between stars”, but the analyses of the light detected clouds of cold particles that cannot be the result of star merger.
The team also found that the outburst produced around 1,000 times less energy than previously observed mergers between stars. The discovered mass of energy is equal to that of Jupiter, they reported.
According to De, the death of the planet was swift especially that “it was so close to the star, and orbited it in less than one day.”
The observation showed that the atmosphere of the planet was ripped by the strong gravity of the star before it was swallowed. This final stage caused the bright glare that lasted for around 10 days.
