2023-05-04 14:32:21
Scientists said on Monday they had observed a dying star devouring a planet for the first time, possibly foreshadowing Earth’s eventual fate of being swallowed by the sun in about 5 billion years.
Compared with this cosmic explosion, the sun will cause only “minor disturbances” when it eventually swallows the Earth, US astronomers said, AFP reported.
Scientists believe most planets will also reach the end of their lives when the host star they orbit runs out of energy. The dying star rapidly expands and transforms into a red giant, swallowing anything that gets in its way.
Astronomers have captured before-and-after images of a star eating a planet in the past, but never before.
Lead author Kishalay De, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said the process of unraveling the unexpected discovery was a “detective story”.
“It all started about three years ago when I was looking at survey data from the Zwicky Transient Facility, which takes nightly images of the sky,” he said.
He stumbled upon a star that increased in brightness more than 100 times in 10 days. The star in the Milky Way is about 12,000 light-years from Earth, near the constellation Aquila.
The star was thousands of degrees hotter than the devoured planet, said Miguel Montarges, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory who was not involved in the study.
“It’s like throwing an ice cube into boiling water,” he told AFP.
Most of the thousands of planets discovered so far outside our solar system “will end up facing this fate,” said study co-author Morgan MacLeod, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.
Earth, by contrast, will likely end its life not with a bang, but with a whimper.
When the sun expands and swallows Mercury, Venus and Earth in about 5 billion years, there will be “less violent disturbances” because the rocky planets are much smaller than the gas giants, McLeod said.
He said the Earth had become “very uninhabitable” before it was engulfed because the dying sun would evaporate all the water on it.
The astronomers said the discovery “illustrates the fleeting nature of our existence” and that the end of Earth “could come to an end in a final flash lasting only a few months”, billions of years after the life of the solar system.
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