A Jupiter-sized planet found itself in serious trouble when its star began to die. The star swelled up and engulfed the planet.
You could say the event is a glimpse of the dismal fate awaiting Earth. The star, which started out similar to our sun in size and composition, is located in our Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Aquila.
A light-year is the distance light travels in one year. Light zips through interstellar space at 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second and 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers) per year, according to NASA.
In a study published in the journal Nature on May 3, 2023, scientists at MIT, Harvard University, Caltech, and elsewhere report that they have observed a star swallowing a planet, for the first time.
“We are seeing the future of the Earth,” said Kishalay De, a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and lead author of the study.
“If some other civilization was observing us from 10,000 light-years away while the sun was engulfing the Earth, they would see the sun suddenly brighten as it ejects some material, then form dust around it, before settling back to what it was.”

The planet was a ‘Hot Jupiter’
“Hot Jupiters” are a class of gas giant exoplanets that are inferred to be physically similar to Jupiter but that have very short orbital periods. They got this name because of their close proximity to their stars and the high surface-atmosphere temperatures.
The planet in this research was a type called a “hot Jupiter” – a gas giant resembling our solar system’s biggest world but with an orbit much tighter to its star. This planet, perhaps a few times bigger than Jupiter, orbited its star in less than a day at a distance closer than Mercury, our innermost planet, orbits the sun.
The star, in this study, is a “red giant” star. This is a star in the later stages of its stellar life. It is said that stars only spend 1 percent of their lives in this stage.

Most stars, including our sun, use hydrogen as their thermonuclear fuel for two reasons: First, stars are mostly made of hydrogen, so it is abundant; second, hydrogen is the lightest, simplest element, and it will fuse at a lower temperature than other elements.
Although stars are huge, they eventually run out of hydrogen fuel. The time required for this to happen depends on the mass of the star. Stars like the sun take about 10 billion years to exhaust the hydrogen in their cores.
As the star grew, its surface drew closer to the planet’s orbit. “The planet started to skim through the star’s atmosphere just like a satellite falling into Earth’s atmosphere. The deeper the planet fell into the star’s atmosphere, the denser its surroundings, and the faster it was dragged inward,” said study co-author Morgan MacLeod, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“This took a planetary orbit that may have existed stably for millions or billions of years and caused it to plunge suddenly into the star, powering the emission that we see. Essentially, the star swallowed its planet so suddenly that we got to see its energetic burp,” MacLeod said, referring to some material expelled into space in a luminous flare. “Intense heat eventually rips the planet apart, and its material is mixed throughout the star.”
“It is humbling to think about our own planet meeting a similar fate, and even more so to realize that we are too small to cause the sun to experience an outburst like the one here. When Earth is eventually swallowed, the sun will hardly notice,” MacLeod said.
