2023-05-07 09:52:25
The researchers had already noted the warning signs and the consequences of this scene. “What we were missing was to surprise the star at this time, when we have a planet that suffers such a fate,” said Kishalay De, researcher at MIT and lead author of the study published this Wednesday on this subject. in Nature magazine.
“Star Fusion”
“It looked like a merger of stars,” he recalls. But the analysis of the light emitted by the star finally revealed the presence of clouds of molecules too cold to have come from a fusion. And the star, “similar to the Sun”, had released an amount of energy a thousand times lower than that expected if it merged with another star.
The planet that was swallowed was very close to the star and on a cosmic scale its death was extremely rapid. According to the study, the planet’s envelope was torn apart by the star’s gravitational forces for a few months, before being absorbed. It is this last phase which produced the luminous radiance for regarding ten days.
The researcher began observing this star in May 2020, earns 20 minutes. It is in the galaxy, some 12,000 light-years from Earth, and had begun to shine a hundred times brighter than usual.
What might happen to Earth
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