Astronomers have seen a star swallow a planet - the same thing will happen to Earth when the Sun starts to die

For the first time in observational history, scientists have seen a star swallow up a planet that was close to it. The same thing will happen to Earth in the not too distant future.

Here's What We Know

Stars like our Sun will, sooner or later, go through a red giant phase. At this stage, they enlarge by several orders of magnitude and swallow up the planets orbiting them. Scientists had previously known about this through calculations, but recently they managed to see the process for real.

The absorption occurred 12,000 light years away from our planet. The burst of radiation was recorded three years ago and was called ZTF SLRN-2020. It took one week for the star to increase its brightness by a factor of 100.

The NEOWISE telescope showed that the energy release was 1000 times less than that of the collision of two stars. This means that the star absorbed a body which was 1,000 times smaller than any of the stars observed merging.

Based on the information, astronomers decided that the star had absorbed a planet. The absorption resulted in an ejection of hydrogen with a mass of 33 Earth masses. The star was about 0.8-1.5 times more massive than the Sun and the planet was 1-10 times more massive than Jupiter.

Mercury, Venus and our planet are expected to do the same as the Sun becomes a red giant. But that won't happen for another 5 billion years.

Source: space