In 2020, astronomers first noticed what appeared to be a star highlighting one of the orbits. But now, the new evidence shows something else that has already happened.
Certainly, a planet has its disappearance at the request of its star, but now the way it happened looks very different. Instead of expanding this star, the planet is close to being consumed, new evidence from NASA James Web telescope for space (Jwst) reveals. This new event is an equal matter – even if it is not what astronomers in the beginning. The researchers published their results on April 10 in Astronomical physical magazine.
“Not every day we find these types of events,” the first author of the study, Ryan LaoThe assistant astronomy said at the National Optical Astronomy Research Laboratory in Toxon, Arizona, to the science of Live Science. This is “a possible deviation of the first planets that occurred in the law.”
The heavenly event, which is called ZTF SLRN-2020, includes a star and planet the size of Jupiter, located in milky way About 12,000 light years of Earth. While watching the star, the researchers noticed a bright flash of visual light, indicating that something – most likely a large planet – was immersed by the star, and left only a cloud of dust.
Very different scenario “
Initially, the researchers believed that the star was similar to the sun and was following the natural life cycle of sun -like stars. Paper 2023 published in the magazine nature The star described as entering the final stage of life as a red giant, where balloons are largely as it is exhausted by supplying it from hydrogen fuel. The sun will meet this fate for about 5 billion years ago, eventually swallowing mercury, Venus It is possible, the earth In this process.
Lao said the data from JWST “draws a completely different scenario.” When the JWST tool in the middle of the infrared and the cunning of infrared, collected information from the crime place, a new image appeared. Notes revealed that the star did not light from it in the form of an expected infrared wavelength from the transition to a red giant. In other words, this was not as bright as expected, indicating that the red giant process was likely not in full swing.
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As for the planet, the devouring, the team suggests that it revolve around it near the host star – even closer to Mercury The sun rotates. Ultimately, the planet of Jupiter began to approach more and more than its star in a tropical process. Lao and his team attribute this tropical decline to tidal reactions, a phenomenon in which the forces of strong gravity between two heavenly bodies can change between these bodies.
Lao said that the entire process took only a few months. After the planet escalated towards the star, I called the star’s roof. From there, the clouds were absorbed in the heart of the star, as they were completely soaked. After that, the star removed the planets, which created the bright event that was first discovered in 2020. This expulsion also included wavelengths and infrared dust, prompting astronomers to believe that the star had expanded, when, in fact, he did not.
It can be difficult to determine events like these because the signs of light that you produce are often very faded. With the opening Vera C Robin ObservatoryLao said, these monitoring signatures – and associated events – can become much easier to discover them.
“We must find a more way than this,” said Lau. “This is something I am very excited.”