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An illustration of the star after devouring the planet. | Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/Ralf Crawford (STSCI)
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) examined the scene of a dramatic collision between a star and its planet, but while astronomers had originally thought that the star was a red giant that devoured the planet, the JWST found a completely different story: the planet fell into the star.
In 2020, the Zwicky Transient facility in the Palomar Observatory in California discovered a distant star – That is about 12,000 Light years Away from us – suddenly light up in the night sky. When looking back at the star in archive data from NASAS Neowise The mission found that the star, the ZTF SLRN-2020, had stopped in the infrared light one year before the optical lightning.
A Study of 2023 came to the conclusion that ZTF Slrn-2020 was a further developed one Sun-Alit as “a” called “red giant“That had expanded so that he entered and a Gas giant planet circle. The light flash was then interpreted planet to be destroyed as it was consumed by the growing red giant; It was accepted meteor.
A team led by Ryan Lau from the Noirlab of the National Science Foundation in Tucson, Arizona, Jwst.
“Since this is such a new event, we didn’t know exactly what we would expect when we decided to point this telescope in its direction,” said Lau in one opinion. “With its high -resolution look in the infrared, we learn valuable knowledge about the final fates of the planetary systems, possibly including our own.”
What Laus found team was a surprise: the star was not bright enough to be a red giant. Instead, it looked like a “regular” star with about 70% of the Mass of our sun. Of course, this changes the story of ZTF SLRN-2020. If the planet was not consumed by a red giant in this system, the opposite is the only explanation: the planet must have come into the star instead.
How can this happen? Well, directly from the first exoplanet discoveries, astronomers have found bizarre worlds as hot Jupiter. These are gas giants that formed far from their star and then wandered inside. This special planet must have hiked so close to its overarching star that over time, the gravitational times are unstoppable to the planet.
“The planet finally began to graze the atmosphere of the star. Then it was an outstanding process to fall in faster from that moment,” said Morgan Macleod from Harvard -Ssmithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The planet, when it falls in, somehow began to smear around the star.”
The tidal dispute began to stretch the planet in an opposite handle until the planet was finally “sprayed” into the gases of the star, and when the star swallowed the planet, he plunged a tidal wave of gas into space. This emitted flag cooled and condensed into a gas cloud, which causes the infrarota recording observed by Neowise.
Four diagrams show how the planet gradually gives closer to its star until it collides and sends a gas cloud into the room that finally forms a ring around the star. | Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/Ralf Crawford (STSCI)
But there was still a surprise. Astronomers had expected to see an amorphous gas cloud, but the near -infrared spectrometer of the JWST found a disc molecular gas that surrounded the star in the immediate vicinity. The hard disk is looking for a miniature planet screen screen for the whole world.
“I could not have expected to see what the features of a planetary region had, although there are no planets here after a covering,” said exoplanet astronomer Colette Salyk from Vassar College in New York.
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It is assumed that the hard drive consists of some outcast gas flags that are back towards the star, but the details are still sketchy. In view of the fact that this is only the first of hopefully similar planet-star collision events, we may find the answers in another Doomsday system. The incoming wide field examinations of the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory (This sees the first light this year) and the NASAS Nancy Grace Roman space telescope It is expected that many other similar events that astronomers can follow with the JWST.
The results were published on April 10th in The astrophysical journal.
