Astronomers think they just saw a planet dive into a star! #space #astronomy #nasa #science #new

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Astronomers just witnessed for the first time a planet dive into a star, ending its existence. I don't know how else to put that. Basically, a couple of years ago, scientists saw a star 12,000 light-years away flash, which is consistent with what we think it looks like when a star gets really big at the end of its life and engulfs its planet, just like how our sun is going to engulf us someday. But see, now they looked at this star with the most powerful telescope in space, JWST, and they don't think it's at the end of its life. They don't think it's getting bigger. So somehow a normal star swallowed its own planet, which is very weird. They think a Jupiter-sized planet was orbiting the star really close, like how Mercury is to our sun, but over millions of years its orbit got closer and closer and closer until eventually it plunged into its star. Then the star swallowed it, and that brightness is what astronomers saw 12,000 years later. We've never seen this happen. We've heard of stars swallowing their planets, but never of planets initiating that. They're not 100% sure that this is what happened, but we may have just witnessed a planet head straight for its end for the first time.