Scientists believe they first witnessed “planetary suicide” for the first time
Two years ago, Astronomers believe that they identified the star whose one of the planets swallowed. Now, new observations about the same consequences of the James Web Space Telescope have proposed a scenario that was previously intended only in the realm of scientific stories: a planet about customer size made directly to its parents’ star. Scientists in charge of these observations believe they saw the first “planetary suicide” in history.
The only method mentioned for a star to consume its planets is to increase the star in a significant size. It happens that a main sequence star, like our sun, gets out of the hydrogen so that it often becomes fuse and swollen to its original size and becomes a red giant. Experts are studying this process with interest because the solar system will probably face it. For about 5 billion years, after the hydrogen tired in its nucleus, the sun expands to 100 times its current radius, and in this process, it swallowed surrounding planets such as mercury and Venus.
When a star attracts a planet, the observatory on Earth recognizes its brightness, though it is short -lived. Such a moment of luminosity is known as Nova.
In 2023, the Gemini South Observatory saw 12,000 Nova’s light -years. At first it was suspected to be a red giant who consumes one of the planets around it. However, two years later, a more accurate analysis of the James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared tool showed that the star is still in its main sequence and fuse the hydrogen – the star is not old and spreads to a red giant. This new evidence suggests that the young star is due to its effect by a body as customer.
According to a new study published in Astrophysical Journal, this is the most convincing direct diagnosis of the planet used by its host star. The same researchers previously stated that this is an evidence of the planet involved in another report, published in nature a few years ago. But in the new study, the team added more evidence of these liquor signs, by performing star spectroscopy – namely visible light analysis and other rays emitted 820 days after its peak brightness.
It offered a new data about the brightness of the star and the debris of the dust and gives the astronomers a better idea than what may have happened in the solar system. They believe that a planet as the customer, as Mercury performs from the sun, gradually approached its star until it was destroyed by the outer layers of the star.
As far as the evidence allows us to know, the planets move towards their star, moving towards destruction. Scientists estimate that this process may be created by the same phenomenon that creates tidal on Earth – the gravitational pull of other adjacent celestial bodies (which is about the Earth and the Sun). For millions of years, the gravitational forces applied by the star extracted some of the planet’s orbital energy and pulled it out of their last path to the host star. In the end, the planet was very close to maintaining its structural integration.
Not all scientific community is convinced by this explanation. One of the main anti -hippies says the star only looks young, because it can be surrounded by a dense cloud of star dust and reduces its radiance. If it turns out that the age or type of star is different from what is assumed, there may be another explanation for Nova.
New measures with more powerful telescopes measure the brightness of the star better and hopefully provide more evidence of what has happened. It is also possible to find more “suicide” planets in the future, indicating that the scenario is more than imagined.
This story appeared first Wired en español And translated from Spanish.
