![]() 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.
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