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A First: Star Caught in the Act of Devouring a Planet
How’s this for a depressing look into Earth’s potential future: astronomers have witnessed the first evidence of a planet’s destruction by its aging star as it expands into a red giant.
“A similar fate may await the inner planets in our solar system, when the Sun becomes a red giant and expands all the way out to Earth’s orbit some five-billion years from now,” said Alex Wolszczan, from Penn State, University, who led a team which found evidence of a missing planet having been devoured by its parent star. Wolszczan also is the discoverer of the first planet ever found outside our solar system.
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Read the rest of A First: Star Caught in the Act of Devouring a Planet (482 words)
© nancy for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Extrasolar Planets, red giant stars
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2012-08-21 00:02:22
Source: http://www.universetoday.com/96927/a-first-star-caught-in-the-act-of-devouring-a-planet/
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