ZTF SLRN ? 2020

ZTF SLRN – 2020
 

News: In a first, scientists have witnessed a bloated star in our own galaxy swallowing a planet.
 

Background:

The researchers used the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at Caltech's Palomar Observatory to spot the star rapidly become 100 times brighter, then figured out why this happened.
 

About ZTF SLRN – 2020:

→ The Sun-like star, identified as ZTF SLRN-2020, gobbled up the entire hot gas-giant planet, nearly measuring in size that of Jupiter.

→ The star is similar to our sun in size and composition and is located in our Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Aquila.

→ After running out of fuel in its core, the star began to grow in size, shrinking the gap with its neighbouring planet, eventually consuming it entirely.
 

Significance:

→ Life cycles of stars have been well studied and understood. Older stars, eventually, ingest the nearby planets (like Mercury and Venus with respect to our Sun), too are scientifically known.

→ Even Earth could face a similar fate five billion years from today. At the end of its life, the Sun will swell up to a size that will certainly be bigger than the present-day orbit of Earth. So nominally, the Earth would get engulfed when the Sun runs out of fuel in about 5 billion years.

→ However, what had never been observed until now was the actual process of a dying star consuming a planet. Now, this has finally happened.