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.
It makes you wonder...
Every atom in your body was once a part of another star at some time in the remote past..................
Bong talk. But I like it.
Can I buy some pot from you?
Didn’t the original Star Trek have an episode like that? As I recall, it was shaped like a giant bugle. They disabled it by setting a crippled starship to explode when it got deep into its throat.
Let’s roll!
There’s a ‘dispensary’ about a hundred yards from my house...................
No, paywall at the link.
I don’t gots no paywall............
So...there's hope for the Jovian moons?
not terrifying at all- earth is gonna be just fine for at least 1007 years- likely even more-
Very small hope.
Even at the size of Mars orbit, the distance from the Sun to Jupiter would be about 3.5 AUs, or 3.5 times the distance from our present Earth to the Sun.
The Sun, being a Red Giant at that time, will put out less heat energy to the remaining planets and their moons, so they will still be cold..............
ugh why do they post crap headlines like this?
Stupid? Click bait? General global warming sounding hysteria?
Or more succinctly, eventually, space will kill us. ALL OF US.
What a stupidly written article.
Nearly all of us will be long dead before space gets close enough to kill anyone.
Actually it’s Gravity that will kill us all, not ‘space’..................
LOL! Maybe we could all run to Guam and help tip the Earth’s orbit towards the Sun.
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