Posted on 05/03/2023 8:54:36 AM PDT by Red Badger
R. Hurt/K. Miller (Caltech/IPAC)
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Ask any astronaut or astronomer and they’ll tell you: Space wants to kill us. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the extreme life threatening cold and hot temperatures, or extinction-level gravity events, or the enormous radioactive explosions, or the planets that rain lava. Pretty much everything out in the twinkling cosmos has our number.
Luckily, those of us on Earth are safe from the dangers of space (well, most of us anyway). However, there are some things that we won’t ever be able to avoid—like the inevitable moment when our planet is swallowed up by the sun. While that reality is still billions of years away, it’s still something that astronomers want to research to better understand the lifespan of stars like the one in the center of our solar system.
Scientists have long known that stars tend to balloon millions of times larger than their original size towards the end of their lives. In the process, they swallow up any and all matter around them including planets. However, it wasn’t until recently that they were actually able to see a star mukbang in action.
A multi-university team of researchers published a study on Wednesday in the journal Nature that described the first ever observation of a star swallowing a planet. The cosmic feast seems to have occurred in our very own Milky Way galaxy, roughly 12,000 lightyears away in the constellation Aquila.
VIDEO AT LINK..................
Astronomers noticed the event in May 2020 after they witnessed the star “brightening by a factor of a few hundred over the course of a couple of weeks,” MIT astrophysicist Kishalay De, who is a lead author of the study, said in a press briefing. At first, the team suspected that they were witnessing a stellar merger, which is when two stars collide.
However, though the explosion was bright, it wasn’t nearly as luminous as typical stellar mergers. A year after the initial observations, they deduced that the cause was from a gas giant being eaten by the star, which resulted in the flash—but not one as bright as two stars colliding.
“What we saw was a stellar merger, but what you have is a star that engulfed a planet instead of a star,” De explained. “This is exciting because this has been one of our fundamental predictions of our understanding of our stars and the surrounding planets.”
The discovery is a bit of a stroke of luck. De had originally been looking through data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) from Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in California for evidence of stellar mergers. Later, he and his team used an infrared camera at the observatory and spotted cold, long-lasting signals. They were surprised at what they found, because stellar mergers typically lead to incredibly hot emissions being expelled out. The colder signal indicated that the star was likely ejecting gas and other matter from a gas giant planet that it had consumed.
Really Intense Global Warming Ping!.................
What can we do to speed up the process?
Don’t get my hopes up
In about 4 billion years, give or take a million or two, the Sun will become a Red Giant as its supply of Hydrogen dwindles down. The Earth, Venus, Mercury and Mars and anything within that Martian orbit will be burned to a cinder forever.
Then we will have REAL GLOBAL WARMING........................
Now they are going into the real Diversity. Equity, and Inclusion, grinder. Right past the gooey cellular level and into a gaseous state. And yes.....Carbon Dioxide traces.
So the universe recycles, right? It’s just a very long time between galactic curbside collection periods.
Oh, stop scare mongering... 
So I guess I better make sure I have an insurance rider for that on my homeowners policy.
Thanks Red Badger, nice two-fer! Oh look, some science-hating a-hole put "fakenews" into the keywords!
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Nope, sorry, that falls under ‘Acts of God.” and won’t be covered.....................
Thanks Red Badger, nice two-fer!
We’d better start preparing now..........................Turn off your GAS STOVES!.................
> In about 4 billion years, give or take a million or two, the Sun will become a Red Giant… <
I heard that Biden recently signed an executive order cancelling that. It’s more evidence of how serious the Democrats are about protecting the Erf.
or using the wrong pronouns.....................
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