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..."
Re:Red giants, the scourge of not our time. (Score:5, Interesting)
A sufficiently advanced and long-lived civilization comes to realize that its sun is a liability, not an asset.
Of course reaching the end of its life and going nova or red giant is bad. But even well before that, stars are known to throw nasty flares and Carrington-type events [slashdot.org]. And go through dim/bright cycles (almost all stars are variable to some degree, including ours).
Colonizing the moon or Mars doesn't guarantee survival of the human race. The only real way to do that is to move the planet far away from the star -- a.k.a. Fleet of Worlds. This is part of the wisdom contained in the Known Space books.
Re:Red giants, the scourge of not our time. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course reaching the end of its life and going nova or red giant is bad. But even well before that, stars are known to throw nasty flares and Carrington-type events [slashdot.org]. And go through dim/bright cycles (almost all stars are variable to some degree, including ours).
Actually, even if the Sun behaves in a perfectly orderly fashion, life on Earth will be doomed long before that since the total radiative output of the Sun will gradually increase as the Sun will be moving on the H-R diagram main sequence. It could easily be unlivable here in just a few hundred million years.