Scientists witness planet get swallowed up by star for first time

This animation depicts the final moments of a giant gas planet as it is gobbled up by a star. It's something scientists knew happened but had never witnessed until now. Probably a giant planet like Jupiter in our own solar system. Dr. Morgan McLeod of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is part of the team studying this galactic supper that happened some 12,000 light years away. There's a star and as it's running out of fuel it's starting to expand and it reaches the orbit of a planet. That planet starts to skim around the atmosphere of the star and then eventually it falls in completely.

That caused the dying star to expand becoming 100 times brighter over several days. The intense glow caught the eye of astronomers. That planet existed there for billions of years and then in something like 10 days is the final ramping up of that sort of being swallowed. You may be wondering if this is the fate of us earthlings. Dr. McLeod says five billion years from now the sun will expand and likely make a meal out of our planet. It almost certainly gets to earth as well.

Earth's orbit is almost at the fringe of its maximum size. No one will be here to witness that though a billion years from now. The sun will expand to a size that makes the earth uninhabitable. Dr. McLeod and scientists from MIT, Caltech and other institutions will continue to study the process to learn exactly how it all happens. Jennifer Egan WCVB News Center five.

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