Astronomers know that red giants eat planets that get too close. But they've never caught one in the act, until now.
According to the team, this is what they witnessed.
So when astronomers detect a light curve that is unlike anything else they’ve observed, excitement builds. When astronomers confront something like this, their next step is to look at it with different tools to see what they can learn. In this case, De turned to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. While the ZTF is a powerful tool for spotting objects that change their brightness, it can’t determine much detail. But the Keck Observatory is different. The Keck Telescopes can take spectroscopic measurements of light, which can reveal a star’s chemical composition.
The presence of these molecules meant that what De was seeing could not possibly be a stellar binary. De waited for more information on the event. About a year after it was first discovered, De and some of his colleagues gathered infrared observations. Was it really cold enough for De’s ‘peculiar molecules’ to exist?
“That infrared data made me fall off my chair,” De says. “The source was insanely bright in the near-infrared.”Kishalay De, MIT Kavli Institute At this point, the puzzle was complete. ZTF SLRN-2020’s initial hot, bright flash was a planet with the same mass as Jupiter being dragged into the expanding atmosphere of a red giant star. This is a cataclysmic event, and as the star consumed the planet, material from the star’s outer layer was blasted away into space. Over the next year, all that gas condensed into cold dust, which explains the infrared data that was such a surprise to De.
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