Planetary Engulfment Illustration

Planetary Engulfment Illustration

Caption

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly decayed over time.

This illustration depicts the sequence of events that took place over millions of years, based on observations from Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRSpec (NIR-Infrared Spectrograph).

Panel 1: The planet was about Jupiter-sized, and orbited very close to the star – even closer that Mercury’s orbit around our Sun.

Panel 2: The planet’s orbit slowly shrank, or decayed, over time, and the planet approached the star. It eventually started to graze the star’s atmosphere. As the planet was falling in, it smeared around the star.

Panel 3: The planet was engulfed by the star completely, and blasted gas away from the outer layers of the star.

Panel 4: As that gas expanded and cooled off, the heavy elements in this gas condensed into cold dust over the next year. There is a hot circumstellar disk of molecular gas closer to the star.

Credits

Illustration

NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)

Keywords

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