What is believed to be the first star to be observed “swallowing” a planet was recorded by NASA’s James Webb space telescope. It is a star located in the Milky Way galaxy, about 12,000 light years away from Earth, and a Jupiter-sized planet that orbiting very close to the star.
The new discoveries suggest that the star actually did not hit to involve a planet, as it was overly supposed. Instead, Webb’s observations show that the planet’s orbit has shrunk over time, slowly bringing it closer to his death until he was totally swallowed.
“Because it is such a new event, we didn’t know very well what to expect when we decided to point out this telescope toward it,” said Ryan Lau, astronomer and main author of the new article.
“With the high resolution look in the infrared (telescope), we are learning valuable information about the final destination of planetary systems, possibly including ours,” said the scientist.
The James Webb space telescope is the world’s leading space science observatory. “Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking at worlds away around other stars and investigating the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it,” says NASA, leader of the international program with ESA (European space agency) and CSA (Canadian space agency).
An initial investigation of 2023 led researchers who accompanied this case to believe that the star was similar to the sun and that it was in the process of aging for hundreds of thousands of years, slowly expanding as it exhausted its hydrogen fuel.
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However, the new discoveries showed a different story: with powerful sensitivity and spatial resolution, the Webb telescope has accurately measured the hidden emission of the star and its immediate surroundings, which are in a region of very populous space. It turned out that the star was not as bright as it should be if it had evolved to a red giant, indicating that there was no swelling to swallow the planet, as thought.
The researchers suggest that at one point the planet was Jupiter’s size, but orbiting very close to the star, even closer than Mercury orbit around our Sun. Over millions of years, the planet orbited closer to the star, which led to a catastrophic consequence.
“The planet, when falling, began to spread around the star,” said Morgan MacLeod, a member of the Harvard-Smithsonian center team of Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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In its final fall, the planet would have expelled gas from the external layers of the star. As he expanded and cooled, the heavy elements of this gas condensed into cold dust the following year.
“With a telescope as transformative as the webb, it was hard for me to get any expectation of what we would find in the star’s immediate surroundings,” Vassar College’s College College said in Boukeepsie, New York, exoplanet researcher and co -author of the new article. “I would say that I did not expect to see what the characteristics of a region of planet formation has, even if the planets are not forming here.”
What happens after the planet is swallowed?
The ability to characterize this gas expelled by the planet opens more questions for researchers about what really happened after it was fully swallowed by the star.
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“This is really the precipice of studying these events. This is the only one we observed in action, and this is the best detection of the consequences after things calm down,” Lau said. “We hope this will only be the beginning of our sample.”
Researchers expect to increase their sample and identify future events like this using the future Observatory Vera C. Rubin and Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, which will research large areas of the sky repeatedly to look for changes over time.
The team’s discoveries were published on Thursday, 10, in The Astrophysical Journal.
