Astronomers in May 2020 monitored for the first time a planet swallowed by the host star, and they believed based on the available data that the planet is artistic with the star’s enlargement in a late stage to become the so -called red giant.
But new views of the James Web telescope, a somewhat anatomical examination of the tragedy, indicates that the planet’s annihilation occurred differently from what was initially believed.
The researchers said that the star did not go to the planet, but rather the opposite occurred with severe consequences, with the fall of the planet in the star after its orbit erosion over time.
The views documented by the James Web telescope showed that the end was very tragic.
And monitored the tropical telescope, which was launched in 2021 and began its operation in 2022, a hot gas that was likely to be a ring around the star after the accident, and a cloud that expands from cold dust surrounding the scene.
“We know that there is a good amount of materials from the star expelled in the way of the planet for the deadly fall,” said Ryan Lao, a head of the study published in the scientific journal (Etterovision).
The evidence after the collision is this remaining dust material that was ejected from the star.
This star is located in the Milky Way galaxy, about 12,000 light -years from the ground towards the “constellation of punishment”.
The optical year is the distance that the light travels in a year and equivalent to 9.5 trillion kilometers.
This star is characterized as a slightly red and weakest lighting than our sun, and its mass is about 70% of its mass.
It is believed that the planet belongs to a category called “hot purchases”, relative to Jupiter, which are giant gas planets with high temperatures due to its narrow orbit around its star around it.
“We believe that it may have been a giant planet, at least larger several times than Jupiter’s mass, to cause such an amazing disorder that we have seen for the star,” said the co -author of the study, Morgan McLoud, a post -PhD researcher at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astronomical Physics.
The researchers believe that the orbit of the planet gradually diminishes due to the interaction of its attractiveness with the attractiveness of the star, and they put forward hypotheses about what happened after that.
“Then the planet begins to contact the star’s atmosphere, and the planet will drop increasingly inside the star,” McLoud said.
“The planet falls inside the star and is stripped of its external invading layers while it was bursting into the star. During this process, the temperature of this collision rises and expels the star’s gases, which results in the light that we see, gas, dust and molecules that surround the star now.”
But researchers cannot confirm the certainty of the actual events of the planet’s annihilation.
“In this case, we saw how the planet fell on the star, but we do not know the certainty of what happened to the planet,” McLoud said.
In astronomy, there are many, highly huge and ‘high -dimensional’ things that are difficult to conduct experiments.
We cannot go to the laboratory and crush a star and planet together.
But we can try to rebuild what happened with computer models. “
None of the planets of our solar system falls close enough to the sun to erode its orbits, as happened in this case.
But this does not mean that the sun will not swallow any of them in the end.
After about 5 billion years from now, the sun is expected to expand outward in the red giant phase, and the closest planets may be swallowed up with Mercury and Venus, and the Earth may swallow. During this phase, the star spoils its outer layers, so that its center remains only, which is the stars called the white dwarf.
The new James Web telescope views provide evidence about the ends of the planets.
“Our observations indicate that the planets may be more likely to meet their inevitable fate by moving slowly towards its host star (which revolves around) instead of turning the star into a red giant swallowing it. However, our solar system appears relatively stable, so you do not have to worry only from the sun turning into a red giant and swallowing us.”
