2023-05-06 15:53:49
This phenomenon had never before been observed by scientific teams. A group of astronomers has nevertheless managed to study the direct engulfment of a planet by a star. In a report published Wednesday, May 3, 2023 in the online journal Nature, this consortium of scientists described the process of this impressive natural event that occurred in the constellation of the Eagle. A star at the end of its life began to swell without anything interfering with it, and due to its tenfold size, the latter swallowed up one of the planets which was in its wake. If this team of researchers was already aware of the process in question, it does not prevent it from being a first in real-time observation of such absorption. In the study report where the latter give an account of this astronomical sequence, Kishalay De, post-doctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and one of the scientists co-authors of the publication, has said: “What we were missing was to surprise the star at that moment, when we a planet who suffers such a fate”. He describes the consequences of this planetary swallowing as “a short-lived optical explosion […] accompanied by a bright and long-lasting infrared emission”, and estimates that this fate might well be that of the blue planet within 4 to 5 billion years.
The Earth might probably be engulfed by the Sun coming to the end of its existence and would then observe (…)
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