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.
12,000 light years away, and we’re viewing it now. That means it actually happened 12,000 years ago. I’m at a loss for what to think about it. We’re on the only KNOWN inhabited planet, so what we have is one less empty planet from among innumerable quadrillions of quadrillions. Beyond that, there is unimaginable violence going on among all the whirling bodies in space. Bottom line question: Do you know Jesus as you personal Savior from sin? He is the ONLY truly safe Haven from eternal harm.
Thank God were not going to use gas stoves or plastic straws now. Thank God the climate scientists know how to deal with this.
I feel safer eating bugs and suffering for future generations who won’t even have electricity or bugs to eat.
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