2023-05-03 17:01:57
Everything in the universe has a beginning and an end. The stars, for example, they are born almost by chance by an accumulation of dust and gas, over billions of years they develop an entire ecosystem of planets, satellites and asteroids around them and, eventually, at some point they run out of fuel and die. but what happens with all those celestial bodies that surround a star when it disappears? The magazine ‘Nature’ publishes the first direct detection of a dying star devouring a planet during the last stage of its life: a phenomenon that in about 5,000 million years will also occur in our Solar System.
And international team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University and Caltech has managed to capture, almost by chance, the last days of a dying star. It is a star located about 12,000 light years from us, in the constellation of Aquila, in our same galaxy. In May 2020, during a routine campaign of observations, astronomers observed an enigmatic outburst in that region of the universe. “It was unlike any other stellar explosion I had ever seen in my life,” explains astrophysicist Kishalay De. And that’s when the investigation into this stellar event began.
“This is the first time we’ve seen something like this live”
The collected data showed the following. In the last stage of its life, this star emitted a cold and long-lasting signal (a sign that it was indeed fading). Suddenly, according to the records, its brightness became 100 times more powerful. And its size expanded dramatically. “These observations are only compatible with the swallowing process of a star,” explain the experts who have led this analysis. “Until now we had indications of what happened before or after this process, but this is the first time we see something like this live“, they add.
the devoured planet
Everything indicates that the devoured planet was, roughly speaking, like our Jupiter. That is, a huge hot world that for billions of years it orbited this star and ended up being swallowed by it. The analyzes suggest that this planet was gradually being attracted towards the star. Once it reached its atmosphere, the star began to devour him and, finally, he absorbed everything. All this stellar banquet could be observed thanks to the gas released during the process (which, so that we understand each other, acted like the crumbs left after eating a cookie).
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“We’ve caught the star in the act. This is what makes this discovery really exciting,” explains Kishalay De. This same process has also been observed in other celestial bodies in our cosmos. The Hubble Space Telescope, for example, recently captured the image of a black hole devouring a star located 250 million light-years from us.In this case, the cosmic feast was also observed thanks to the crumbs that left the black hole after swallowing the star.
“We are looking at the future of the Earth and the Solar System”
As the astronomers explain, these types of observations provide a key clue to understand what will happen in our own Solar System several billion years from now. “We are seeing the future of the Earth,” argue the experts. “If some other civilization was watching us about 10,000 light-years away as the sun engulfed the Earth, you would see the sun suddenly shine as it ejects some material, then forms a kind of dust mass around it before going back to what it was“, they add. Well, in the universe, as we said at the beginning, everything has a beginning and an end.
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