For the First Time Ever, Astronomers Witness a Star Swallowing a Planet Whole

Earlier this week, a group of astronomers claimed to have witnessed what seemed to be a gas giant the size of Jupiter devoured by its star. The findings are a first of its kind.

"As a star runs out of fuel, it will billow out to a million times its original size, engulfing any matter — and planets — in its wake," Jennifer Chu from the Massachusetts News Office wrote. "Scientists have observed hints of stars just before, and shortly after, the act of consuming entire planets, but they have never caught one in the act until now."

The sun-like star had reportedly been growing for eons, becoming so massive that it swallowed the closely orbiting planet in one fell swoop. In the past, scientists have seen signs of various stars biting planets and their digestive aftermath. The study published in the journal Nature is apparently a sign of things to come for Earth in about five billion years. This will happen once the sun becomes one red giant, gobbling up the four inner planets in its path.

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It was Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher Kishalay De who found the peculiar outburst in 2020 from sky scans taken by the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory. Among the MIT co-authors of the study include Deepto Chakrabarty, Anna-Christina Eilers, Erin Kara, Robert Simcoe, Richard Teague, and Andrew Vanderburg. Fellow researchers from Caltech, the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and multiple other institutions joined the team, too.

“For decades, we’ve been able to see the before and after,” De said in an MIT news release. “Before, when the planets are still orbiting very close to their star, and after, when a planet has already been engulfed, and the star is giant. What we were missing was catching the star in the act, where you have a planet undergoing this fate in real-time. That’s what makes this discovery really exciting.”

According to astronomers, the star's next course may well occur thousands of years from now. Thousands of more stars and planets will likely suffer the same fate. The solar system will eventually be gobbled up, as well.