For the first time, astronomers have observed a dying star billowing up and swallowing one of its planets—just as the Sun will someday consume Earth. SunDay
For the first time, astronomers have observed a dying star billowing up and swallowing one of its planets—just as the Sun will someday consume Earth. Researchers spotted the event some 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila while searching for the fireworks associated with stellar mergers. The relatively minor cataclysm, which flared only 1/1000th as brightly as a binary star merger, could open a whole new field of study, researchers say.
Astrophysicists have long known that when a Sun-like star runs out of fuel, it becomes a red giant, big enough to engulf any close-orbiting planets. The growth occurs when a star exhausts the hydrogen fuel in its core and the fusion reactions that make the star shine spread outward in search of more fuel, swelling the star’s outer layers. That means the Sun will eventually envelop Earth and the other rocky planets—although it won’t happen for another 5 billion years.
One star—later dubbed ZTF SLRN-2020—grew 100 times brighter over the course of 10 days before slowly fading. Unsure what it was, the team obtained the star’s spectrum—a breakdown of its brightness across different wavelengths—from one of the giant W.M. Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii. The merger of two stars typically produces lots of superhot hydrogen and helium, which leaves bright emission lines in the spectrum. But these were missing.
As the star swelled, a companion object began to rub up against its outer layers, heating them up and causing them to brighten in the infrared. The friction would also have degraded the companion’s orbit until it plummeted into the star. That dive would inject a lot of gravitational energy into the star, puffing it up so that it flared brightly at optical wavelengths.
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