Captured for the first time ever images of a planet devoured by its star, just as Earth is predicted to do five billion years from now, when the aging Sun begins to expand. They were taken up by the Gemini South telescope of the NoirLab, of the American National Science Foundation, active in Chile and what was immortalized was a sort of smoking gun, a very bright and prolonged jet of matter, which lasted at least ten days. The result is published in the journal Nature by Kishalay De, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Morgan MacLeod, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Mansi Kasliwal, of the California Institute of Technology and Ryan Lau, of NoirLab.
“These observations provide a new perspective for finding and studying the billions of stars in our Milky Way that have already consumed their planets,” Lau said. For Kishalay De, we can now imagine that, “if in the future other civilizations were to observe the Sun while the Earth from a distance of 10,000 light years, they would see our star immediately become brighter and throw material out before resuming the initial appearance “.
Until now, dying stars had been observed that were on the verge of swallowing their nearest planet or that had just done so; This is the first time a star similar to our Sun, which has aged and expanded 100 to 1,000 times its original size, has been seen devouring its planet. Over the course of ten days, the jet of matter produced by this cosmic catastrophe became 100 times brighter, before fading over the next six months.
It happened in our galaxy, about 13,000 light years from Earth. The observation dates back to May 2020, but it took another year before we understood what was happening. In essence, what has been seen is the moment when the star is finishing swallowing the planet, probably a gas giant similar to Jupiter.
Source: Ansa
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