Ogre
Planet eating star
Artist's impression of a red supergiant engulfing a planet.
Astronomers have reported the first evidence of a planet's destruction by its own, aging host star. Evidence indicates a planet was devoured as the star began expanding into a "red giant" the stellar equivalent of advanced age, scientists say. "A similar fate may await the inner planets in our solar system, when the Sun becomes a red giant and expands all the way out to Earth's orbit some five billion years from now," said Alex Wolszczan of Penn State University, one of the members of the research team, who is also credited as the discoverer of the first planet found outside our solar system. The astronomers also identified a massive planet in a surprisingly elliptical or "stretched" orbit around the same red-giant star, named BD+48 740, which is older than the Sun and about 11 times wider. Wolszczan and colleagues identified evidence of the planetary demise while using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope on Mt. Locke, Texas to study the aging star and to search for planets around it. The evidence includes the star's peculiar chemical composition, plus the highly unusual elliptical orbit of its surviving planet, they said. "Our detailed spectroscopic [color] analysis reveals that this red-giant star, BD+48 740, contains an abnormally high amount of lithium, a rare element created primarily during the Big Bang 14 billion years ago," said research team member Monika Adamow of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments