Earth may be the same place where this star ate its own planet

The Final Fate of the Earth: An Accidental Discoveries of a New Type of Merging Stars and a Planetary System

“Whether or not the Sun will engulf the Earth is quite controversial,” she says. “But it wouldn’t matter because our beautiful Earth will no longer have an atmosphere and oceans,” he said. Earth may survive, but not the Earth that we know and love.”

This star had been brightening over time in infrared light, which can indicate the presence of dust. In fact, it turns out that this star started showing a brighter infrared signal months before it made its big outburst of light.

Puzzled, Dr. De and his colleagues observed the star again, this time in infrared light, using another camera at the Palomar Observatory and NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope. The system turned out to be brilliant in infrared, a band of the light spectrum that is ideal for spotting faint objects that don’t emit much energy. The researchers thought that they might be watching a star eat a planet in real time.

The lead author of a new report says that it is the final fate of the Earth.

Signs of engulfment events are littered across the Milky Way. The light of a few stars is polluted by chemical signatures from other planets, suggesting that the whole universe is being Digested before our eyes. Scientists have also spotted hundreds of planets with small orbits that are doomed to fall within the radius of red giants in the future.

“We weren’t quite looking for this. We were not looking for this in the same way. “Like a lot of discoveries in science, this happened to be an accidental discovery that really opened our eyes to a new type of phenomenon.”

The light sparked by the stars is faint and ephemeral, so it’s challenging to capture this moment. Dr. de was using a telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California in May 2020 to look for red novas, a type of merging stars. He stumbled across a burst of light in his observations.

But one particular stellar outburst looked unusual. Instead of being surrounded by hot gas, it was surrounded by molecules that can only exist at cold temperatures.

It looked almost like a pair of stars had merged, “but everything was scaled down, from the energy emitted to the mass expelled,” says Morgan MacLeod, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a member of the research team.

The planet could be anywhere from between a few to maybe ten times Jupiter’s mass, she says, “but can’t be much more than that. We just don’t have enough oomph in that explosion.”

A Planet Eats Itself: Can It Share the Same Fate As It Does? An Astroparticle Simulation Reveals What It’s Saying About Its Star

The researchers took all of their observations from telescopes and created astrophysical simulations that allow them to recreate what happened.

“So it’s heating up material, and it’s expelling that stellar atmosphere gas, so it’s slamming into the star’s atmosphere continuously.”

As the planet goes through the star’s atmosphere, the drag makes the planet’s orbit tighten. The stellar atmosphere gets denser as it gets closer to the star. That makes its orbit tighten even more.

Later, however, the star looked very similar to how it did before the outburst, “almost like the star ate that planet and forgot about it completely,” says De.

Smadar Naoz, an astronomer at UCLA, told me that the Earth could move slightly away and that the Sun could lose a little mass as it expands.

She was thrilled by the new observations, saying that theorists have been making predictions about what the process should look like for a long time.

The star’s spin is something that I would like to understand. Will it really be spinning fast, as we predict it will?” she asks, adding that even just this one example will help theorists know what they got wrong and what they got right.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/03/1173082322/this-star-ate-its-own-planet-earth-may-share-the-same-fate

A star in a coma: What happened to Kasliwal’s first planet, the first of a million years later?

Scientists say such planetary endings must be happening all the time, and Kasliwal says there’s already instrumentation in the works that should make it easier to detect more of them.

“What about littler planets? What about slightly different stars?” says Kasliwal. “I think there is a whole census done of these sorts of events.” I mean, what we’re seeing is just the first one, but the first of many more to come.”

The life cycles of stars is linked to the mass of their people. Red dwarfs and other smaller stars can be seen for billions of years, while the most massive stars can be seen just millions of years after they are born. When stars like the sun die, they turn into red giants that consume anything within their borders, as they grow larger and larger.

The doctor said what happened was like a detective story. To identify the burst, his team obtained visible-light observations of the source captured in November 2020 by the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. They showed a star at 5,000 degrees cold, 10 times more chilly than a red nova.