An artist concept shows a hot gas ring that remains after a star consumed a planet, in this illustration without date. NASA’s James Webb space telescope observed such a ring and also found a colder dust expanding cloud that wraps the scene. | Photo credit: NASA
In May 2020, astronomers for the first time observed a planet that their host star swallowed it. Based on the data at that time, they believed the planet with its fatality when the star swelled at the end of his life, becoming what is called a red giant.
New observations of the James Webb space telescope, a kind of postmortem exam, indicates that the disappearance of the planet occurred differently than the initially thought. Instead that the star arrives on the planet, it seems that the planet reached the star, with disastrous consequences: a fall in death after erosion of the orbit of the alien world in time, the researchers said.
The end was quite dramatic, as demonstrated by the sequelae documented by Webb. The orbiting telescope, which was launched in 2021 and was operational in 2022, observed that hot gas probably formed a ring around the star after the event and a cooler cloud of freshest dust on the scene.
“We know that there is a good amount of star material that is expelled as the planet goes through its fall in death. The evidence after the facts is that this dusty weights was expelled from the host star,” said astronomer Rylab, lau or uses from the United States to use they use they use they use they use they use they use they use they use they use. They use use of Use, the study published in the Astrophic magazine.
The star is located in our dairy road galaxy about 12,000 light years from the earth in the director of Constellation Aquila. A light year is the distance that travels in a year, 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion km). The star is slightly redder and less luminous than our sun and about 70% of its dough.
It is believed that the planet has been of a class called “hot jupiters”: gas giants at high temperatures due to a tight orbit around its host star.
“We believe that it had to be a giant planet, at least several times Jupiter’s mass, to cause such dramatic disturbance for the star as we are seeing,” said the co-author of the Morgan Macleod study, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsic.
Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system.
The researchers believe that the orbit of the planet had gradually deteriorated due to their gravitational interaction with the star, and hypothesized what happened next.
“Then it begins to graze through the atmosphere of the star. At that time, the wind against breaking the stellar atmosphere is taken and the planet falls faster and faster in the star,” Macleod said.
“The planet falls inward and is stripped of its gaseous, since it deepens the star. On the road, which rotation is heated and expels the stellar gas, which gives rise to the light small and gas, dust and molodules.
But they cannot be sure of real fatal events.
“In this case, we saw how the planet’s lunch affected the star, but we really do not know with certainty what happened to the planet. In astronomy there are many things too big and too much” to do experiments. Diabolical.
None of the planets of our solar system is close enough of the sun so that their orbits decompose, as happened here. That does not mean that the sun will not swallow any of them. Within five billion years, the sun is expected to expand outwards in its red giant phase and could well engulf the most interior planets Mercury and Venus, and perhaps even the earth. Duration in this phase, a star blows its external layers, leaving only a nucleus, a stellar remnant called white dwarf.
Webb’s new observations are giving clues about the end of the planetary game.
“Our observations suggest that perhaps it is more likely that the planets will meet their final destinations slowly towards their host star that becomes a red giant to swallow them. Our solar system seems to be a relatively adorned thought and swallowing us,” Lau said.
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Posted on April 13, 2025