With over 5,800 detected exoplanets existing outside the Solar System, one has disappeared, and its situation is unique. While exoplanets disappear occasionally, the end of a planet is new. Situated 12,000 light-years away, the planet’s engulfment is an event that brings interest to astronomers and how they view the future of planetary systems, including Earth, that exist. Is it a stretch to connect an exoplanet that is placed so close to the sun with Earth? Here’s what NASA had to say about the exoplanet’s disappearance.
The disappearance of the planet: how it happened might shock you
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope caught a surprise twist to the disappearance of this exoplanet. With the sensitivity and spatial resolution of NASA’s telescope, Webb found the orbit of the ZTF SLRN-2020 planet shrinking, then eventually drawing close to the 0.7 solar mass K-type star to be engulfed. In contrast to the initial research, the star did not expand to engulf the planet.
Surprised by the occasion, Ryan Lau, lead author of the new paper and astronomer at NSF NOIRLab (National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) in Tucson, Arizona, says:
“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 … “
He further says that:
“With its high-resolution look in the infrared, we are learning valuable insights about the final fates of planetary systems, possibly including our own.” Conducting the post-mortem of the event to draw up a concrete conclusion, Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) were used.
Team member Morgan McLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says:
“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.”
The genesis of the brightening event: It all went wrong
Located about 12,000 light years away from Earth, the ZTF SLRN-2020 exoplanet’s disappearance drew much confusion. The event, formally named ZTF SLRN-2020, includes the exoplanet that was originally spotted as an optical light flash using the Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California.
Initial data from NASA’s NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) recorded the “sun-like” star, a 0.7 solar mass K-type star, as an aging star, expanding while releasing hydrogen fuel.
How does this revolutionize how we view the Solar System?
Finding a cloud of cooler dust around the star and molecular gas, Webb’s high spectral resolution proves to be an amazing tool for the researchers’ further experiments about what happened after the star swallowed the exoplanet. Here’s what Colette Salyk of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, exoplanet researcher and co-author of the new paper, had to say:
“With such a transformative telescope like Webb, it was hard for me to have any expectations of what we’d find in the immediate surroundings of the star … I will say, I could not have expected seeing what has the characteristics of a planet-forming region, even though planets are not forming here, in the aftermath of an engulfment.”
After five years of assuming a concluded scientific discovery, a plot twist occurred in the Solar System. Many, like myself, wonder how many more surprise changes will occur in the universe and how many of those will be discovered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Will rising outer space events change how the universe is narrated and observed by years of research? With the surprise of many researchers and scientists, it wouldn’t be surprising to discover more “impossible” concepts about the universe.