Astronomers had finally witnessed a dying star engulfing a planet. The breathtaking sight showed how the star multiplied its brightness before it faded.
Dying Star Spotted Eating a Planet
For the first time, scientists have determined the flare of light when an orbiting planet of a dying star is engulfed by a dying star. Despite the fact that this phenomenon has long been theorized, seeing it in action will help astronomers understand what happens to a planetary system as the star enters its dramatic death throes, swelling to hundreds of times its original size and consuming everything in its path before ejecting its outer material and collapsing down into a hotly glowing stellar remnant, ScienceAlert reported.
This is the first time the act has been observed, and it is only 12,000 light-years away from Earth. Earlier observations captured the stages right before and just after one of these planetary engulfments.
They noticed that the star was beaming with an excess of intense, long-lasting infrared light and abruptly grew in brightness by a factor of 100 before rapidly disappearing.
Astrophysicist Kishalay De of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research remembered spotting a star that suddenly became 100 times brighter during a week. According to him, he had never witnessed a brilliant eruption like it.
A review of the scientific literature revealed that the pattern of the light's emergence, decay, and persistence as cool material glowing infrared was consistent with a red nova, a sort of explosion caused by the collision of two stars.
According to De, it implies that whatever joined the star had to be 1,000 times smaller than any other star we've observed. It's a fortunate coincidence that Jupiter's mass is roughly 1/1,000 that of the Sun. They then understood that it was a planet colliding with its star.
It provides data that scientists can use to create more precise predictions about the end for our small region of the Milky Way galaxy and is compatible with models that anticipate what will occur when the Sun reaches the end of its existence.
The Sight Is the Future of the Earth
De claims the sight is the future of the Earth when the Sun engulfs it, and another civilization observes the sight from 10,000 light-years away. The expert said they would notice the Sun suddenly brighten as it expels some material, then form dust around it, before settling back to what it was.
A star like the Sun dies in a very bizarre manner. According to De, they have seen how it works by seeing other stars in the Milky Way at different phases of their lives.
The delicate equilibrium between the outward pressure of fusion and the inward pull of gravity begins to fall apart as the star runs out of hydrogen fuel to burn in its core.
More hydrogen from the star's outer layers is drawn toward the center as the core begins to compress, where it gathers in a shell surrounding the core. The hydrogen shell begins to fuse under the heat and pressure of the star, producing additional heat that causes the star's outer layers to expand up to hundreds of times their original size.
However, as they become thinner than before, the very outer layers cool toward the redder end of the spectrum, resulting in what is known as the red giant.
According to the researchers, this information fills in a "missing link" in our knowledge of the development of planetary systems. They refer to these types of phenomena as "subluminous red novae" and think ZTF SLRN-2020 can shed light on how planetary engulfment might affect the brightness, chemical make-up, and rotational speed of late-stage stars.
They predict that subluminous red novae occur between 0.1 and many times a year. They hope to locate many more of them now that they know what they look like.
De said they had access to the before and after while the planets were still rotating very close to their star, and after, when a planet has already been devoured, the star is huge. However, catching the star in the act, where a planet is experiencing this fate in real-time, is what they were missing. But the recent discovery had finally given them the evidence they needed.
The research was published in Nature.
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