By Andrea Hargraves 
For the first time, astronomers believe they have spotted a star swallowing up one of its planets. This may be the fate in store for Earth – but not for another 5 billion years, when the Sun will reach the final stage of its life and bulge like a red giant.
The event observed by the team led by Kechalai D, of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), USA, includes a star with a mass comparable to that of the Sun that may still be in its adult stage (what astronomers call a main sequence). Or at the beginning of the (giant) swelling phase that comes when the nuclear fusion that fuels the hydrogen in the star’s core runs out.
The discovery included the detection of a UFO with data from the Zwicky Transient Installation (ZTF), a project located at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California that aims to identify stars that undergo abrupt changes in behavior. In this case, the star located 12,000 light-years away in the constellation of the Eagle and identified as ZTF SLRN-2020 experienced a sudden red glow for ten days and then gradually faded over the course of six months. At the same time, there was also an increase in infrared emission that persisted much longer than the additional brightness decay observed in visible light.
The event, which was observed over the following days and months by many telescopes on Earth and in space, resembled a red nova — the fleeting event astronomers associate with the merger of two stars. However, it was a smaller version of this phenomenon, which made scientists led by Dea assume that they had witnessed a star swallowing up a giant planet.
Modeling of the process is consistent with what has been observed and indicates that the collision involved a world similar in size to Jupiter (up to ten times its mass). The planet would have interacted gravitationally near its star for 6 to 12 years before devouring it and then producing a large amount of dust in the “waist” of the star, which is responsible for the subsequent infrared emission surge.
Everything already indicates that these events have become commonplace. Apart from the fact that we know that there are giant planets in extremely short orbits (the so-called hot Jupiters), subject to destabilization, astronomers have already noted evidence of former planet swallowing in the rotation pattern and chemical composition of stars. However, this is the first time that such an event has been “caught in the act”.
Post a file results In the latest issue of the journal Nature, researchers led by De estimated that such events should occur in the Milky Way at a rate of at least once every ten years – and possibly several per year. Knowing what to look for, scientists now hope that future survey projects will routinely identify these red mininovae, reveal how often planetary swallows occur, and eventually provide analogs for the eventual fate of the solar system’s inner worlds — including our own.
This column appears on Mondays hard copyin Folha Corrida.
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