How will life on Earth end? What have we seen

Scientists have seen a preview of what Earth's tragic fate could be: In space, a planet was swallowed up by its star.

Following the trail of a brilliant explosion that occurred far away in deep space, scientists were able to see something incredible: for the first time, they were able to observe a star in the act of devouring its planet, a gas giant like Jupiter. It was like getting a preview of what's to come on Earth, experts suspect.

A Star Has Engulfed Its Planet: The Sighting

Scientists at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have made a sensational discovery. While looking at data collected by the Zwicky Transient Facility, the archive of bright events in the sky (the same one that recently identified Scary Barbie ), they found a strange flare called ZTF SLRN-2020, which began as a brilliant flash of light and then intensified 100-fold over the next few days. Before going out, this brightness remained active for 100 days.

The researchers then used instruments at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to break light down into its wavelength components, to discover its chemical composition. Initially they thought they had detected a nova, but the chemical signatures then led astronomers to another, much more fascinating theory. The molecules produced by the celestial body were in fact those seen only in very cold stars , which however do not emit such flashes. Finally, the mystery was solved by exploiting NASA's NEOWISE infrared space telescope.

What the scientists saw was nothing but the last moments of life of a planet engulfed by its star, which burned red-hot as it fell into the core of the red giant before being reduced to dust. The phenomenon occurred about 13,000 light years from us: the planet involved was a gas giant like Jupiter , at least 30 times larger than Earth. While its star, which had now reached the end of its life cycle due to hydrogen depletion, had swelled up to hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of times its original size. The details of the sighting were published in Nature in recent days.

The Fate of the Earth: This is how Life will End

This is the first time that astronomers have observed the last moments of life of a planet, just before it is devoured by its dying star. And it is a sensational sighting, because it tells us a glimpse of our destiny : "We are seeing the future of the Earth. If other civilizations were watching us from 10,000 light-years away, when the Sun engulfed the Earth, they would see our star ejecting matter and suddenly become bright and dust formed around it, you You will see it return to its original state. , a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of the study.

The fate of our planet is in fact to end up devoured by the Sun, together with Mercury and Venus (the closest planets). But there's still time: that won't happen until about 5 billion years from now ."I think there is something very surprising about these results that speak to the ephemeral nature of our existence. After the billions of years that life in our Solar System has faced, our final stages will probably be concluded in a flash that will last only a few months " – said Ryan Lau, astronomer of NOIRLab and co-author of the publication.