“That infrared data made me fall off my chair,” De said, with the readings suggesting the star could have been merging with another star. The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.įirst, the signal showed up in data from the Palomar Observatory in California, then De searched data on the same star from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, before using an infrared camera at the Palomar Observatory to gather more information. This meant that the team had to wait in order to understand the properties of the dust, De explained. “However, it takes time for gas to become cool and start condensing dust molecules.”

“One of the key pieces of evidence we were trying to understand is that the outburst was producing dust in the lead up to and after the outburst,” said De. They observed the activity in May 2020, but it took a year to work out what they had seen. The planetary demise took place around 12,000 light-years away in the Aquila constellation, and involved a planet the size of Jupiter, researchers said. “It was unlike any stellar outburst I had seen in my life.”Īn artist's impression shows the planetary demise. “One night, I noticed a star that brightened by a factor of 100 over the course of a week, out of nowhere,” said De in a press release. Astronomers observed this as a white-hot flash, followed by a longer-lasting colder signal, which they later deduced was caused by the star engulfing a planet. The process sees a star billow out to a million times its original size as it runs out of fuel, engulfing any matter in its wake. “The fact that the solar system planets would get engulfed into the sun in the future was something I had read first in high school, so it was surreal to realize that we may have found the first ever example of catching a similar event in real time!” study lead author Kishalay De, a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told CNN. While astronomers have previously seen planets just before and just after being engulfed by a star, this is the first time that a planetary demise has been observed, according to a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology. In a world first, scientists have observed the moment that a dying star consumed a planet - a fate that eventually awaits Earth.

Amazons and swallows