In about 5 billion years, the Sun will have exhausted its hydrogen reserves and will shut down, leading to gravitational compression of the Sun and making it smaller and hotter. Over the previous 5 billion years, while burning hydrogen, the sun manufactured an enormous amount of helium. When the sun becomes gravitationally compressed, the helium fusion temperature will be reached, which will reignite the sun’s nuclear furnace, although the fuel will no longer be hydrogen but helium. The sun will become a red giant and grow rapidly, swallowing the nearest planets one by one, possibly including the Earth.
A team of scientists from institutions such as MIT, Caltech, and Harvard have observed how a star swallows a planet whole. The event took place about 12,000 light-years away, near the constellation Eagle, and was detected when the star grew 100 times brighter in just 10 days before fading away.
Astronomers found a cool, long-lasting signal after the explosion, suggesting that it was a star that devoured a nearby planet. The planet was probably hot, about the size of Jupiter, and was drawn into the atmosphere of the dying star and then into its core. According to scientists, the same fate awaits Earth in 5 billion years.
It took the researchers more than a year to find an explanation for the event after the initial signal appeared in a search of data taken by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), which scans the sky for stars that rapidly change brightness.