Observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have provided a surprising twist in the narrative surrounding what is believed to be the first star observed in the act of swallowing a planet. The new findings suggest that the star actually did not swell to envelop a planet as previously hypothesized. Instead, Webb’s observations show the planet’s orbit shrank over time, slowly bringing the planet closer to its demise until it was fully engulfed.
The star at the center of this scene is located in the Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years away from Earth. A transient outburst of light caused by the engulfment of the planet was discovered in 2020 by Kishalay De, an assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia, who is an author on the new paper that describes the findings. Observing that 2020 outburst prompted the authors on the paper to examine it more closely to see exactly what had happened.
“Scientists have long assumed that, late in their lives, stars grow into gigantic red giants and engulf planets around them, and a natural explanation for the outburst we found was that the planetary destruction was caused by the slow death of the star” De said. “The new data shows that planets may be destroyed well before the end of the lives of their host stars because of the strong gravitational interactions between them. This result offers new directions for us to understand how stars and planets may co-evolve with each other, and helps us interpret the population of (surviving) planets we currently discover around other nearby stars.
Read more about the findings on the James Webb Space Telescope’s news website.
