‘Surprising twist:' James Webb Telescope gives first look at a star swallowing a planet

Yahoo

12-04-2025

(KRON) — NASA's James Webb telescope has made the first-known observation of a planet swallowed up by a star, with 'surprising' results, scientists say.
'Observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have provided a surprising twist in the narrative surrounding what is believed to be the first star observed in the act of swallowing a planet,' a new NASA article on the observation reads. 'The new findings suggest that the star actually did not swell to envelop a planet as previously hypothesized. Instead, Webb's observations show the planet's orbit shrank over time, slowly bringing the planet closer to its demise until it was engulfed in full.'
The observed star is located in the Milky Way galaxy, about 12,000 light-years from Earth. Two instruments aboard the James Webb Telescope were used to perform a 'post-mortem' assessment of the star and consumed planet. The research suggests that a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting closer to the observed star than Mercury's orbit around our sun, slowly orbited closer and closer to the star over millions of years until it was ultimately consumed.
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Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. said that the planet, 'eventually started to graze the star's atmosphere. Then it was a runaway process of falling in faster from that moment. The planet, as it's falling in, started to sort of smear around the star.'
An artist's recreation of the event shows how the planet entered the star, leaving behind a ring of space dust.
'In its final splashdown, the planet would have blasted gas away from the outer layers of the star,' NASA said. 'As it expanded and cooled off, the heavy elements in this gas condensed into cold dust over the next year.'
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Ryan Lau, the lead author of the new paper and astronomer at the National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Tucson, Ariz. said that the observation could provide insight into the future of our own solar system.
'Because this is such a novel event, we didn't quite know what to expect when we decided to point this telescope in its direction,' Lau said. 'With its high-resolution look in the infrared, we are learning valuable insights about the final fates of planetary systems, possibly including our own.'
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