"Astronomers Spot First Direct Evidence of a Star Engulfing Its Planet"
As stars age they eventually start running out of fuel. First, it's hydrogen, then helium, and next to run out are carbon, nitrogen and oxygen (the "CNO cycle"). The rate that this happens is strongly dependent on the mass of the star with massive stars having a short lifetime whereas less massive stars such as our own continue to burn for 10 billion years or so. As these various fuels are used up, the temperature at the core of the star rises which increases the outward thermal pressure on the star's outer layers and it expands.
This is what will eventually happen to our sun and the Earth's orbit places it in the region that will likely end up with it being engulfed by the sun. However, this has not been observed before until now. The Keck observatory on Mauna Kea was used alongside other observatories to observe the results of the expansion of a dying star engulfing a Jupiter-sized planet that orbited the star.
https://www.keckobservatory.org/death-star/
"For the first time, astronomers have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet whole. The sun-like star, called ZTF SLRN-2020, lies about 15,000 light-years away in our Milky Way galaxy and is thought to have engulfed a hot gas giant planet about the size of Jupiter or smaller.
Scientists already knew that older stars will, as they puff up with age, ultimately ingest their inner orbiting planets. Our own Sun is predicted to do so in 5 billion years, consuming Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth. But nobody had seen direct evidence for such a remarkable scenario until now.
“The confirmation that sun-like stars engulf inner planets provides us with a missing link in our understanding of the fates of solar systems, including our own,” says Kishalay De, a postdoctoral scholar at MIT and lead author of a new study about this so-called “Death Star” publishing May 4, Star Wars Day, in the journal Nature."
As stars age they eventually start running out of fuel. First, it's hydrogen, then helium, and next to run out are carbon, nitrogen and oxygen (the "CNO cycle"). The rate that this happens is strongly dependent on the mass of the star with massive stars having a short lifetime whereas less massive stars such as our own continue to burn for 10 billion years or so. As these various fuels are used up, the temperature at the core of the star rises which increases the outward thermal pressure on the star's outer layers and it expands.
This is what will eventually happen to our sun and the Earth's orbit places it in the region that will likely end up with it being engulfed by the sun. However, this has not been observed before until now. The Keck observatory on Mauna Kea was used alongside other observatories to observe the results of the expansion of a dying star engulfing a Jupiter-sized planet that orbited the star.
https://www.keckobservatory.org/death-star/
"For the first time, astronomers have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet whole. The sun-like star, called ZTF SLRN-2020, lies about 15,000 light-years away in our Milky Way galaxy and is thought to have engulfed a hot gas giant planet about the size of Jupiter or smaller.
Scientists already knew that older stars will, as they puff up with age, ultimately ingest their inner orbiting planets. Our own Sun is predicted to do so in 5 billion years, consuming Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth. But nobody had seen direct evidence for such a remarkable scenario until now.
“The confirmation that sun-like stars engulf inner planets provides us with a missing link in our understanding of the fates of solar systems, including our own,” says Kishalay De, a postdoctoral scholar at MIT and lead author of a new study about this so-called “Death Star” publishing May 4, Star Wars Day, in the journal Nature."