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Scientists have observed a star that has swallowed a planet. That happened about 12,000 light-years away with a planet about ten times the size of Jupiter.

It is the first time the event has been observed in real time. Astronomers expect that the Earth will one day be ‘eaten’ by the sun in the same way.

The star was at the end of its life and was therefore burned out. When that happens, a kind of explosion ensues in which the star grows more than a thousand times in size. In doing so, all matter around the star is swallowed up in the heat, including planets. The planet resisted with its own gravity, but could not match the star’s enormous power. The whole eruption and engulfment lasted a few months.

The observation was made by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University. In the scientific journal Nature, they explain how they observed the eruption using infrared data from a NASA space telescope. The eruption was already discovered in 2020, but it took scientists three years to find out exactly what happened.

More often than not, stars run out of fuel and planets disappear as a result. “We actually see the future of Earth,” explains MIT space researcher Kishalay De. When the sun is burned out, it also explodes, to then swallow the earth, Mercury and Venus, among other things. In a few months, all planets will be completely destroyed. That is not expected to happen for another 5 billion years.

“It’s crazy to think that our own planet will meet a similar fate,” said fellow Harvard researcher Morgan MacLeod. The sun probably doesn’t notice much of the engulfment then, because the earth is quite small. “When the Earth is finally swallowed up, the sun will hardly notice.”