Estrela swallowing planet is first recorded by NASA telescope

“With the high resolution look in the infrared (from the telescope), we are learning valuable information about the final destination of planetary systems, possibly including ours,” said the scientist.

The James Webb space telescope is the world’s leading space science observatory. “Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking at worlds far around other stars and investigating the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it,” says NASA, leader of the international program with ESA (European space agency) and CSA (Canadian space agency).

An initial investigation of 2023 led researchers who accompanied this case to believe that the star was similar to the sun and that it was in the process of aging for hundreds of thousands of years, slowly expanding as it exhausted its hydrogen fuel.

However, the new discoveries showed a different story: with powerful sensitivity and spatial resolution, the Webb telescope has accurately measured the hidden emission of the star and its immediate surroundings, which are in a region of very populous space. It turned out that the star was not as bright as it should be if it had evolved to a red giant, indicating that there was no swelling to swallow the planet, as thought.

The researchers suggest that at one point the planet was Jupiter’s size, but orbiting very close to the star, even closer than Mercury orbit around our Sun. Over millions of years, the planet orbited closer to the star, which led to a catastrophic consequence.

“The planet, when falling, began to spread around the star,” said Morgan Macleod, a member of the Harvard-Smithsonian center team of Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.