The James Webb space telescope revealed a surprise. A planet swallowed by its star generates controversy due to a turn of events not contemplated. It was the first star observed in the act of swallowing a planet. The new findings are in The Astrophysical Journal.
They suggest that the star really did not swell to wrap a planet, as believed. Instead, Webb’s observations show that the planet’s orbit was reduced over time. He slowly approached his disappearance until he was completely engulfed.
Planet falling apart
“Because it is such a new event, we didn’t know very well what to expect.” It was declared Ryan Lau, principal author of the new article and astronomer of Noirlab in Tucson, Arizona. “It is valuable information about the final destination of the planetary systems, possibly including ours,” he added in a statement. The star in the center of this scene is located on the Milky Way, about 12,000 light years from the earth.
The data showed that the star actually shone in the infrared one year before the flash of optical light. This indicates the presence of dust. It was believed that the star was more similar to the sun and that it had been in the process of aging until it became a red giant for hundreds of thousands of years. It expanded slowly as it exhausted its hydrogen fuel.
There was a planet swallowed by its star, but there was no expansion that wrapped the planet as believed. For millions of years, the planet orbited increasingly closer to the star, which caused the catastrophic consequence. «The planet finally touched the atmosphere of the star. From that moment on, there was an uncontrolled process of falling to the star. The planet, when falling, began to spread around the star ».
Starting point
In its final descent, the planet would have expelled gas from the external layers of the star. As it expanded and cooled, the heavy elements of this gas were condensed in cold powder during the following year.
«This is really the starting point to study these events. He is the only one that we have observed in action, and this is the best detection of the consequences once the situation has stabilized, ”they said. “We hope this is just the beginning of our sample.”
