In 2020, astronomers first saw that a star appeared as one of his orbiting planets. But now, new evidence suggests that something else has actually happened.
A planet definitely met his star at the behest of his star, but now the way it happened looks very different. Instead of expanding this star, it attracted the planet close and close until it was consumed, NASA’s new evidence James Web Space Telescope (JWS) reveals. This novel event previously serves as an equally attractive – even if it is not that astronomers initially believed it. Researchers published their findings on 10 April The astrophysical journal,
“It’s not every day that we find such events,” the first authors of the study, Ryan LauThe National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory at Tuxon, Arizona, told Live Science at the Laboratory. It is “the possibility of the first planet -attached event that was caught in the Act.”
Astronomical phenomenon, ZTF SLRN-2020 dubbed, which includes a star and his Jupiter-shaped planet, Milky Way About 12,000 lights from Earth. Looking at the star, the researchers noted a bright flash of optical light, indicating that something – most likely that was attached by a large planet -star, left only a cloud of dust.
‘A very different scenario’
Initially, the researchers thought that Tara was similar to the sun and was following the natural life cycle of stars similar to sunlight. A 2023 paper published in the journal Nature The star was described as a red spacious as to enter the final stage of life, in which this balloon quite eliminates its supply of hydrogen fuel. The Sun will complete this fate in about 5 billion years, eventually mercury will swallow Venus And, the possibility, the earth in the process.
But JWST’s data “paint a very different scenario,” Lau said. JWST’s mid-infrared instrument and near-anticipated spectrograph collected information from the scene of the crime, a new picture appeared. The comments showed that the star was not emitting light as an infrared wavelength expected from infection in a red giant. In other words, it was not bright as expected, showing that the red was not likely to be a huge process.
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For the devotee planet, the team proposes that it revolves close to its host star – even close to close Mercury Recurses the sun. Finally, the Jupiter-shaped planet began to go close to and close to its star in a process called orbital decay. Lau and his team depict this orbital decay to tidal interaction, an event in which strong gravitational forces between two astronomical bodies can change dynamics between those bodies.
The whole process probably took a few months, Lau said. After spirals towards the planet’s star, it created contact with the surface of the star. From there, the drag force sucked it in the star’s core, where it was fully attached. The star then excluded the contents of the planets, which for the first time in 2020 created a brighting event found. This rejection also included long -lasting infrared wavelengths and dust, causing astronomers to believe that the star had expanded, in fact, it was not, in fact.
Such events can be difficult to present because the light signatures produced by them are often quite unconscious. With the opening of Vera c. Rubin ObservatoryLau said, this observation signature – and their related events – can be very easy to detect.
“We should find more of these ways,” Lau said. “It’s one thing that I am very excited.”
