A star swallowed a planet for the first time! - the end of the world as we know it
Imagine you were born with a curse: somehow, you can see the future,
but the only thing you can see about the future is your own death.
Somehow, you know how you will die. You can’t really do anything about it. Perhaps you can
live your life pretending that will never happen, but you know the future you foresaw is certain.
In the same way, we know something about the faith of the Earth. Maybe we are unaware of the
single details, but here’s what will happen in the deep future: it will be swallowed up by the Sun.
The bad news is that astronomers have recently observed a star gobbling up a planet,
the first direct glimpse of this gnarly process. It is a bit creepy because now we know something
more about the end of planet Earth. Follow me in this video to get to know
more about stars devouring planets and the end of the world as we know
it. ---
Planetary engulfment Astronomers have made a discovery that not
only sheds light on planetary system evolution but also provides an eerie glimpse into the eventual
fate of our own Earth. For the first time ever, they have witnessed a star in the act of devouring
a gas planet similar to Jupiter and possibly even larger. This shocking event occurred about 12,000
light-years from Earth and was a serendipitous find by scientists. This process is predicted
by stellar evolution models, and it is a direct consequence of a star approaching its death. It
is known as planetary engulfment, and it has never been observed before. Let’s try to understand what
planetary engulfment actually is by reading this sad letter a dad wrote to his daughter.
“Dear, it is with a heavy heart that I must inform you about the terrifying process known as
planetary engulfment. This is a fate that awaits all the inner rocky planets in our solar system,
including Earth, and it is not a pleasant one. As a star enters its advanced age, it begins
to swell up into a red giant, expanding far beyond its original radius. In this process,
the star's atmosphere becomes so vast and overwhelming that it consumes any nearby planets.
Imagine being swallowed whole by a massive, fiery entity, an experience that is sure to
bring sheer terror to anyone who witnesses it. The smaller inner rocky planets like Mercury,
Venus, and Earth are too frail to withstand the engulfment. They will quickly spiral
towards the sun due to the drag forces from the surrounding stellar atmosphere.
That means that there will be no escape from this catastrophic event for us. We can do nothing
but watch in horror as the very planet we call home is devoured by the star it orbits around.
Even larger planets or substellar objects called brown dwarfs can survive, but they might not come
out of it unscathed. The density of a star's expanded atmosphere can strip away the outer
layers of an orbiting planet, making it something completely unrecognizable from its former self.
The apocalyptic imagery of this process is truly petrifying. We can only hope that it
will not happen in our lifetime, but it is a sobering reminder of the sheer power and might
of the universe. So let us cherish the beautiful planet we have now, and strive to protect it
from any and all dangers that may come our way.” Wow. That was both really sad and inspiring at the
same time. It made me quite emotional. ---
--- The discovery
Anyway, now that we know what planetary engulfment is, we can surely understand the reason why the
new discovery is a really important one. It has actually been described as a “missing link” in
our understanding of planetary systems’ final fates, including that of the Earth. Kishalay De,
one of the study’s authors, remarked that the event provides an insight into the Earth’s
future. “This is the eventual fate of the Earth,” he said. “We are really seeing what the Earth is
going to run into five billion years from now.” Astronomers have long suspected that engulfment
events occur frequently, given the pollution of some stars’ light with the chemical signatures
of planets. Furthermore, hundreds of planets have been observed with small orbits that are destined
to fall within red giants’ radius in the future. However, capturing the moment a planet is
swallowed by its star is an incredibly challenging task, as the light sparked by
these events is faint and ephemeral. Dr. Kishalay De and his team at the Zwicky Transient Facility,
a camera on a telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California, were actually looking for something
completely different when they stumbled across a curious burst of visible light in May 2020.
What followed was like a “detective story,” as the team worked together to identify the burst.
They obtained visible-light observations of the source captured in November 2020 by the
W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which revealed a star chilling at about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit,
approximately 10 times colder than the searing temperatures expected from red novas.
Puzzled by this, Dr. De and his colleagues observed the star again, this time in infrared
light, using another camera at the Palomar Observatory and NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope.
This system turned out to be brilliant in infrared, a band of the light spectrum that
is ideal for spotting faint objects that don’t emit much energy. The researchers
finally realized that they were most likely watching a star consuming a planet in real time.
As we’ve already noted, this discovery has important implications for our understanding
of planetary systems’ final fates. It also opens up new opportunities for researchers to study the
chemical composition of swallowed planets and the impact these events have on their stars.
This recent study highlights the importance of continued research and development of
scientific tools and techniques, which enable us to capture unique
and rare moments in our universe. Such discoveries provide invaluable insights
into the workings of nature and shape our understanding of the universe as we know it.
However, there’s one last question we didn’t answer yet: what really happened to the planet?
Well, as a matter of fact for many thousands and millions of years, the super hot remnants of this
planet are most likely going to circulate inside the star inside. Its envelope will approach the
core much closer and it will potentially influence the star in some other ways.
In other words, the planet is still there! It’s not like it instantaneously disappears.
It's just really really hot and it's going to remain that way for a pretty long time.
This will definitely have more effects on the star, effects that might become observable in
the future. We will make sure to keep you updated whenever new studies will come out.
--- Hey! Are you still there? If you
are enjoying this video, consider subscribing to the channel! It’s really important for us!
--- Survivors and Progenitors
However, there’s one thing to note here: current stellar evolution models are not
perfect because they are based on our current understanding of
the physics and processes involved in star formation and evolution.
They are constantly being refined and updated as new observations and data become available.
Nevertheless, they are currently the best models we have to explain how stars evolve over time.
Recent observations and studies have shed new light on the process of planetary engulfment,
especially on the planets that manage to survive the catastrophe. These observations
have shown that the surviving planets and brown dwarfs are often much larger than expected,
indicating that they must have undergone significant changes during the engulfment process.
In particular, studies have shown that the progenitors of the survivors were likely
hundreds of times more massive than the surviving objects themselves. This means
that the planets underwent significant mass loss or fragmentation during the engulfment process,
leading to their current smaller size. However, there is still much we do not
know about the process of planetary engulfment, especially in regard to the effects of planetary
evaporation under the star's heat. Further research and observations will be needed to
better understand this process and refine our stellar evolution models accordingly.
--- Outro
As you can see, it will be inevitable for us to become an interplanetary species one day. It will
be actually necessary if we don’t want to die on this planet as a result of planetary engulfment.
Perhaps one day, in some billion years, we will be chilling on another planet,
observing the universe through our new powerful telescopes, and we will be able to spot a pale
blue dot while it gets swallowed up by the Sun. That’s when we will know humanity did a great job,
of preserving the most precious thing in the whole universe:
the gift of life. ---
Recap Hey! I know you might not have time to watch
a whole 10 minutes video. This recap is for you! First of all, the discovery of a star devouring
a gas planet similar to Jupiter provided astronomers with insight into the fate of Earth.
This scary phenomenon has a name, it’s called planetary engulfment and it occurs when a star
approaches its death and its atmosphere becomes so vast that it consumes any nearby planets.
The sad part is that inner rocky planets like Earth cannot withstand the engulfment and, in the
far future, will spiral toward the sun due to drag forces from the surrounding stellar atmosphere.
However, some planets overcome the engulfment. These survivor planets are often much larger than
expected, indicating that they must have undergone significant changes during the engulfment process.
The crazy part is that the progenitors of the survivors if they existed,
were likely hundreds of times more massive than the surviving objects themselves.
--- Hey,
this video ends here! Thanks for watching! What do you think about this new discovery? Do you think
we will ever manage to leave the Earth before planetary engulfment takes place? Or do you think
we will die on this planet? Let us know in the comments below! See you next time on the channel.