The star is ZTF SLRN-2020 and is about the same size as the Sun. At about 15,000 light-years away from Earth, it’s far too far for humans to travel, but it’s pretty close on the grand scale of the universe.
Observations using the Zwicky Search Facility (ZTF) in California captured the star’s dramatic brightness, followed by a few days of fading. This is a common phenomenon in active stars, but follow-up observations using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii yield somewhat inconsistent results.
Researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)kishalay de“I’ve been looking for exploding stars, called novae,” he explained. “However, the Keck data showed that the star was not firing hot gas that would occur in a nova, and we had no idea how to interpret it.”
De describes a so-called “Death Star” published last week in the scientific journal Nature.Research Papersis the principal author of
Questions about the stellar explosion were shelved until De’s team collected observations from various instruments.NASA’s NEOWISE Space TelescopeEarlier infrared data from the ZTF showed that the star was bright nine months before the ZTF observations.
“The infrared data was one of the big hints that this was the moment a star swallowed a planet,” said study co-author Viraj Karambelkar, a graduate student at Caltech where De was enrolled at the time. It has said.
Slowly, the full story of what happened to the star began to unfold. The aging star appeared to begin to expand. This is what the Sun will look like in billions of years. A Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the star began to skim the surface of the expanding star, and as it began to collapse, it ripped hot gas from the star.
Animation of a star swallowing a planet (R. Hurt/K. Miller (Caltech/IPAC))
Then, the star began to run wild a little.
“The planet plunged into the star’s core and was swallowed up, transferring energy to the star,” De explains. “The star blew away its outer layers to release its energy. The star expanded and glowed, and that’s what the ZTF recorded.”
The gigantic “cosmic burp” emitted by the aging, expanding star after swallowing the giant planet was powerful enough to be picked up by telescopes.
The results of this observation are important as they give us a glimpse of what will happen on Earth in the future.
“We’re still amazed that we caught a star swallowing a planet,” said Mansi Kasriwal, a Caltech astronomy professor and co-author of the paper. The earth is one of them,” he said. “But that’s a long way from now, five billion years from now, so we don’t have to worry about it yet.”
