Amazing stuff! For earthlings, nothing to worry about for another few billion years! When coming closer becomes too close.
"A few billion years from now, the Sun will begin to burn out and swell to hundreds of times its current size, consuming Earth and the other inner planets in a fiery haze of plasma. Astrophysicists had thought this was the only way for a star to consume its planets. But now, astronomers working with NASA’s JWST have uncovered a new way for a planet to meet its end: plunging itself into its host star.
The star lies 12,000 light-years away in our own Milky Way Galaxy, and it caught the attention ... in 2023 when it flashed brightly. This observation, ... suggested the star had absorbed a planet during its end-of-life red giant stage. It was the first time astronomers had witnessed such celestial infanticide.
But the new observations scramble that narrative. The star’s luminosity shows it’s too young to have reached its red giant stage, so it couldn’t have enveloped the planet. ... the Jupiter-size planet orbited the star at about the same distance that Mercury orbits our Sun. Over millions of years, the planet crept closer to the star, until the two suddenly merged, in an explosion more akin to astrophysical suicide than infanticide."
From the abstract:
"The subluminous red nova (SLRN) Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) SLRN-2020 is the most compelling direct detection of a planet being consumed by its host star, a scenario known as a planetary engulfment event. ...
If ZTF SLRN-2020 was not triggered by stellar evolution, we suggest that the planetary engulfment was due to orbital decay from tidal interactions between the planet and the host star."
Astronomers spot a planetary ‘suicide’ "World seen plunging into its star for the first time"
An artist’s rendering of a planet spiraling into its host star, albeit in far fewer than the millions of orbits required
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