This artist’s impression shows a doomed planet skimming the surface of its star.
Astronomers spotted a star just around the corner from Earth in the Milky Way consuming one of its inner planets for the first time.
The star is called ZTF SLRN-2020 and is roughly the same size as our sun. It’s about 15,000 light years from us, which is farther than any humans are likely to ever travel but quite nearby on the grand scale of the universe.
Observations from the sky-scanning Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) in California revealed the bloated star dramatically glowing brighter before starting to fade over a period of several days. This is the kind of behavior scientists commonly see from active stars, but something didn’t add up when follow-up observations from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii were closely examined.
“I had been looking for erupting stars called novae,” MIT researcher Kishalay De said in a statement. “But the Keck data indicated that the star was not lighting up hot gas as is expected for novae. I couldn’t make any sense of it.”
De is lead author of a study about the so-called “Death Star” published last week in Nature.
For a year the question of the star’s outburst was set aside until De and colleagues were able to collect more observations of the star from other instruments. Earlier infrared data of the star from NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope showed it brightening nine months before what ZTF saw.
“The infrared observations were one of the main clues that we were looking at a star engulfing a planet,” says Viraj Karambelkar, a co-author and grad student at Caltech, where De also was at the time.
Slowly a narrative of what happened with the star began to be pieced together. It seemed the aging star began to expand, just as our sun will in several billion years from now. A close-orbiting giant Jupiter-sized planet began to skim the surface of the plump star, causing the world to begin to disintegrate while also pulling hot gas away from the star.
Then things got a little out of hand.
“The planet plunged into the core of the star and got swallowed whole. As it was doing this, energy was transferred to the star,” De explains. “The star blew off its outer layers to get rid of the energy. It expanded and brightened, and the brightening is what ZTF registered.”
The aging, expanded star ate a giant planet and then let out a massive, cosmic belch so powerful that our telescopes were able to pick it up.
It’s a major first, and also a foreboding preview of what’s to come.
“We are still amazed that we caught a star in the act of ingesting its planet, something our own Sun will do to its inner planets,” says co-author Mansi Kasliwal, a professor of astronomy at Caltech. “Though that’s a long time from now, in five billion years, so we don’t have to worry just yet.”
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