But astronomers had never actually seen this happen until now. Instead, as it burns up its fuel, a star will get dimmer and swell outward, engulfing anything in its path. In theory, unless a star is about 8 times more massive than our Sun, it won’t die in a supernova. Finally, they settled on a theory on what the burst meant: 12,000 light years away, a bloated, dying star had swallowed up a gas giant a few times the mass of Jupiter.įor more than a century, physics models have predicted that this should be the ultimate fate of planets orbiting close to certain smallish stars. Over several years, De and his colleagues poured over this data and information from three other observatories. It took several months for the star’s light to slowly fade to its normal faint glow. Over several nights, a distant star grew more than a hundred times brighter. The bright flash of light in data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) looked like nothing MIT astronomer Kishalay De and his colleagues had ever seen before. Like most scientific discoveries, this one started with someone noticing something weird. They published their findings in the journal Nature.
And astronomers recently witnessed it for the first time in a star system 12,000 light years away. That’s the fate of most worlds around middleweight stars, according to physics. Whether we like it or not, someday, our Sun will swell outward and engulf our planet like a fiery amoeba.
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