Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thank CTOnews.com netizens soft media Xinyou 1933769 for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, May 4 (Xinhua) while studying a brightening star, Kishalay De, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accidentally observed a startling phenomenon: the star is devouring a wood-like planet. This is the first time that mankind has witnessed the process of an extrasolar planet being swallowed by its parent star, and it also reveals the future fate of Earth for us.

De observed a star near the constellation Eagle in 2020 using the Zwiki transient Facility (Zwicky Transient Facility) at the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology and found that its brightness increased a hundredfold in a week. He initially thought it was a common stellar explosion, known as nova, but after further analysis of the spectral data, he found that the star was surrounded not by hot gas, but by cold gas. This cold gas is usually produced by the merger of stars.

To test his conjecture, Germany used the Keck Observatory in Hawaii (Keck Observatory) and NASA's near-Earth asteroid exploration satellite (NEOWISE) to collect more data. He found that the explosion produced a large amount of dust and released very little energy, only 1/1000 of the star merger events previously observed. This means that objects merged with stars must be very small, about 1/1000 of the mass of the sun, which is exactly the mass of Jupiter.

"only then did we realize that this was a planet that crashed into its home planet." De said in a statement.

It is estimated that the event released 33 times the Earth's mass of hydrogen and 0.33 times the Earth's mass of dust. The researchers speculate that the swallowed planet is about 1 to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, while the home star is similar to the sun.

This discovery is of great significance for understanding the evolution of the solar system and other planetary systems. Scientists believe that when the sun and similar stars run out of hydrogen near their cores, they will expand into red giants and engulf planets in closer orbits, and Earth will suffer the same fate in about 5 billion years.

"if I were sitting on a planet 10,000 light-years away from Earth, I would see a similar flash from the solar system-a little weaker than this, because the Earth is much smaller than Jupiter-which makes us feel the significance of this discovery from a human point of view." De said.

They hope to take a closer look at the system and look for more similar events to answer unknown questions such as whether the planet has been completely destroyed or whether other factors have brought it closer to its home planet.

De and his colleagues published their findings today in the journal Nature. CTOnews.com attached the article address: click here Direct.

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