NASA Just Watched a Star Eats Its Planet

It's not often NASA gets to see a planet get eaten by its host star. That's exactly what happened some 12,000 light-years away from the Milky Way with the star only known by ZTF SLRN-2020. In a new study published Wednesday in Nature Astronomy, scientists have, for the first time, used infrared technology to watch the aging star swallow a Jupiter-sized planet it was nearby.

"This type of event has been predicted for decades, but until now we have never actually observed how this process plays out," MIT astronomer and the study's lead author Kishalay De said in a press release.

We've long thought that, at the end of their lives, stars like our Sun swell up to 100 times their former diameter and consume surrounding planets. Now, we've seen it. 15,000 light-years away, a hungry star consumed a nearby planet. https://t.co/2XcfC7djIM pic.twitter.com/Ym6GJsMn6Y

— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) May 3, 2023

The star is comparable to our Sun, which will go through the same process in roughly five billion years. At that time, the Sun will balloon in size, swallowing Mercury, Venus, and perhaps even Earth. According to the study, the massive planet was even closer to its star than what Mercury is to our Sun.

As this particular star grew, the planet's orbit slowed down dramatically before sucking the planet into the star's outer atmosphere, not unlike a meteor entering Earth's atmosphere.

"Very few things in the universe brighten in infrared light and then brighten in optical light at different times. So the fact that NEOWISE saw the star brighten a year before the optical eruption was critical to figuring out what this event was," De continued. "If I were an observer looking at the solar system 5 billion years from now, I might see the Sun brighten a little, but nothing as dramatic as this, even though it will be the exact same physics at work."

The team used NASA's Near-EArth Object Wide Field Infrared Survery Explorer (NEOWISE) to view the event.

"This discovery shows that it's worthwhile to take observations of the entire sky and archive them, because we don't yet know all of the interesting events we might be capturing," NEOWISE deputy principal investigator Joe Masiero added. "With the NEOWISE archive, we can look back in time. We can find hidden treasures or learn something about an object that no other observatory can tell us."

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