For the first time, astronomers have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet whole. The sun-like star, called ZTF SLRN-2020, lies about 15,000 light-years away in our galaxy and is thought to have engulfed a hot gas giant about the size of Jupiter or smaller. Scientists already knew that older stars will, as they puff up with age, ultimately ingest their inner orbiting planets. Our own sun is predicted to do so in 5 billion years, consuming Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth. But nobody had seen direct evidence for such a remarkable scenario until now.
"The confirmation that sun-like stars engulf inner planets provides us with a missing link in our understanding of the fates of solar systems, including our own," says Kishalay De (MS '18, PhD '21), a postdoctoral scholar at MIT and lead author of a new study about the findings in the journal Nature.
