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As stars begin to reach the end of their life cycle, they get bigger. Surrounding planets lose their orbital energy and move closer together, eventually being consumed by the star.
The Earth will eventually be swallowed up by the Sun, but that won’t happen for at least five billion years. The Sun is estimated to be about halfway through its life cycle.
Astronomers at the University of Hawaii have discovered three planets about to be absorbed by stars similar in mass to our Sun. They were detected using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) space telescope.
“The changes we expect to see for the Sun are the same as we see in these different solar systems where the radius of the star increases, the star swells and cools, but the radius will increase so dramatically that we we expect the inner planets of the solar system to actually be consumed by the surface of the Sun itself,” said Nick Saunders, a UH graduate student working on the project.
“So as the radius of the Sun moves away, the inner planets out to the vicinity of Earth will likely be inside the star at that time,” Saunders said.
The three observed planets (TOI-2337b, TOI-4329b, TOI-2669b) are less than 2,000 light-years from Earth.
The planet labeled TOI-2337b will be swallowed up by its star in less than a million years. Of all the currently observable planets, this one will be consumed by a star the earliest.
