Astronomers Watch Star Devouring Planet 97
jamstar7 writes "According to Universe Today, 'Astronomers have witnessed the first evidence of a planet's destruction by its aging star as it expands into a red giant. "A similar fate may await the inner planets in our solar system, when the Sun becomes a red giant and expands all the way out to Earth's orbit some five-billion years from now," said Alex Wolszczan, from Penn State, University, who led a team which found evidence of a missing planet having been devoured by its parent star (abstract, pre-print). Wolszczan also is the discoverer of the first planet ever found outside our solar system. The planet-eating culprit, a red-giant star named BD+48 740, is older than the Sun and now has a radius about eleven times bigger than our Sun. The evidence the astronomers found was a massive planet in a surprising and highly elliptical orbit around the star — indicating a missing planet — plus the star's wacky chemical composition.' Five billion years or so is a long way off, so it's likely none of us has to worry about it. But still, watching a star eating its own planets is not only cool in its own right, but also provides food for thought as to how to keep the human species going long after the Sun starts going off the main sequence into red giant-hood. And, of course, putting more funding into astronomers' and physicists' hands now can give us a closer estimate of when it'll happen. It's all in the math..."
Headline is vague (Score:3, Informative)
I would have been far more interested to know what kind of crazy planet was capable of devouring stars.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Vague title (Score:5, Informative)
The original article from Penn State is much clearer
http://science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2012-news/Wolszczan8-2012 [psu.edu]
Wait... this took seven WEEKS to hit mainstream? (Score:5, Informative)
Please don't tell me it was off for peer review!?
Apart from that: Headline and TFS is sensationalist trash. No direct observation of the planet being devoured as suggested, we'll have to wait for the new L2 space telescope for even a possibility of that. All we have is an anomalous Li spectrum which **suggests**, in accordance with **currently accepted theory** of lithium propagation, that a planet **may** have just fallen into its parent star.