What's more, that infrared brightness continued after the sudden flare-up. In fact, it turns out that this star started showing a brighter infrared signal months before it made its big outburst of light. This star had been brightening over time in infrared light, which can indicate the presence of dust.

Instead of being surrounded by hot gas, it was surrounded by molecules that can only exist at cold temperatures.Īnd when De started gathering data from infrared telescopes, including archival data, he found something else surprising. De was hoping to find erupting stars called novae.īut one particular stellar outburst looked unusual.

'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.'Ībout three years ago, De had been going through observations made by the Zwicky Transient Facility, an instrument near San Diego that routinely scans the skies every night, looking for flashes of cosmic fireworks. We were looking for similar things, but not quite this,' says De.

In recent years, scientists have learned that our galaxy is chock-full of planets, and astronomers believe that many of them will get gobbled up at the end of their star's evolution.īut no one had ever caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet. 'It's a bit poetic, in that, you know, this is going to be the final fate of the Earth,' says Kishalay De, a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the lead author of the new report. During a survey of the sky, astronomers saw the star suddenly and briefly brighten, becoming about 100 times more luminous over around 10 days.įollow-up observations suggest that what they witnessed must have been the star's ingestion of a hot gas giant planet about the size of Jupiter, according to a new report in the journal Nature. This particular star lies about 15,000 light years away. That's because, for the first time, they've spotted what appears to be a sun-like star gulping an orbiting planet. Astronomers have gotten a sneak peek at what could be Earth's ultimate fate in about 5 billion years when the sun reaches the end of its life and engulfs the solar system's inner planets – including our own.

All I See by Nell Iris