Two years ago, a star on its deathbed was charged with a heinous act — eating a planet — in a system 12,000 light-years away from Earth.
But new evidence has emerged in the case that astronomers say exonerates this elderly Milky Way star of the crime. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a collaboration of NASA and its European and Canadian space counterparts, a team observed that while the planet did die in the belly of a stellar beast, it didn’t go down the way they once thought.
Rather than the star bloating into a red giant that then swallowed the Jupiter-sized world, the planet’s orbit had slowly shrunk, bringing it ever closer to its star. Eventually, the planet collided with the star.
It all boils down to culpability, and it seems, at least in this case, the distant planet essentially jumped down the star’s throat.
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