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Two years ago, Astronomers believe they discovered a star that devours one of his planets. Now, new observations on the consequences of the same event by the James Webb spatial telescope have suggested a scenario previously considered only in the fields of scientific fiction: that a planet for the size of the self-destructive Jupiter is running straight to his parent star. Scientists responsible for observation believe that they were witnesses of the first “planetary suicide” in history.
The only way marked for a star consume its planets is for the star to grow significantly in size. This happens when a The star of the main sequenceLike our sun, it ends with hydrogen to unite and swell in many times its original size, becoming a red giant. Experts are studying this process of interest because the solar system itself is likely to face it. At about 5 billion years, after you have exhausted hydrogen at its core, the sun will expand its current radius 100 times, devouring planets nearby such as Mercury and Venus in the process.
When a star absorbs a planet, observations on Earth reveal an increase in its brightness, though the short -lived one. Such a moment of lighting is known as Nova.
In 2023, the southern Gemini Observatory observed a NOVA 12,000 light years away. Initially it was suspected to be a red giant who consumed one of its nearby planets. However, two years later, a more detailed analysis with the infrared instrument of the spatial telescope James Webb found that the star was still in its main sequence phase, joining the hydrogen – the star was not aging and expanded to being a giant red. This new test suggests that the new star’s Nova was caused by her being influenced by a Jupiter -size body.
According to a recent study published in AstrophysicsThis Nova is the most persuasive direct discovery of a planet consumed by its host star. The same scholars had already submitted that this Nova was evidence of a planet that was included in a report, published in Nature A couple of years ago. But in the new study, the team added more evidence that this was the signs of an involvement, having performed the star spectroscopy – that is, the analysis of the visible light and the other radiation it issued – 820 days after its peak.
This provided new data on the sparkle of the star and the dust debris extracted, and gave the team of astronomers a better idea of what may have happened in that solar system. They believe that a Jupiter -size planet, rotating at the same distance as Mercury does from the sun, gradually approached its star until it was destroyed by the outer layers of the star.
As for the rehearsals we allow us to know, the planets moving towards their star, towards destruction, are not common. Scientists estimate that the process may have been caused by the same phenomenon that generates tides on earth – gravitational attraction of other nearby celestial bodies (which in the case of the earth is the Moon and the Sun). Over the millions of years, the gravitational forces exercised by the star would have extracted some of the planet’s orbital energy, pulling him out of his stable path to the host star. After all, the planet would have orbited very close to maintain its structural integrity.
Not the whole scientific community is convinced by this explanation. One of the main anti-hypotheses says the star looks only young because it can be surrounded by a dense cloud of stellar powder, moistening its brightness. If it turns out that age or star type is different from what is hypothesized, then there may be another explanation for Nova.
New measurements with more powerful telescopes will better measure the splendor of this star, and hopefully they will give more evidence of what happened. It is also possible that more “suicide” planets will be found in the future elsewhere, revealing that the scenario is more common than thought.
This story originally appeared in Wire in Spanish and has been translated from Spanish.
