All stars, including our Sun, have a limited lifetime. Composed of cosmic dust, helium, hydrogen, and other ionized gases, stars turn into a red giant towards the end of their lives, then expand and shrink into a planetary nebula.
This process begins with the depletion of hydrogen in the star. The star expands as a result of helium fission and begins to swallow the planets around it. But this process has never been observed by humanity until now, let’s repeat, until today.
observed for the first time
- Illustration of the observed event.
Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have observed a star swallowing the giant planet in the constellation Aquila, about 12,000 light-years away. The star was swallowing a Jupiter-sized planet.
After this event, it was observed that the star reached a brightness 100 times higher than its normal brightness and completely lost its brightness after 10 days.
The star will now spend the next 100 thousand years as a red giant.
How was this observation made?
This observation, a first in human history, was made possible by NASA’s NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer) spacecraft launched in 2009.
The planet also struggled for a while not to die…
Examining the data from NEOWISE, scientists saw the presence of dust around the star. Scientists stated that the presence of dust indicates that the planet is pulling hot gas from the surface of the star and scattering it into space. These gases, which were scattered into space, eventually turned into dust with traces.
Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury may one day suffer the same fate:
When the hydrogen in our Sun runs out, the same fate we see in the image above will befall the planets closest to the Sun. These planets are also expected to be Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth. Although an exact time cannot be given, fortunately, according to estimates, we still have a long time ahead of us: 5 billion years.
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