Ammon News - In May 2020, astronomers for the first time observed a planet getting swallowed by its host star. Based on the data at the time, they believed the planet met its doom as the star puffed up late in its lifespan, becoming what is called a red giant.

New observations by the James Webb Space Telescope - sort of a postmortem examination - indicate that the planet's demise happened differently than initially thought. Instead of the star coming to the planet, it appears the planet came to the star, with disastrous consequences - a death plunge after an erosion of this alien world's orbit over time, researchers said.

The end was quite dramatic, as evidenced by the aftermath documented by Webb. The orbiting telescope, which was launched in 2021 and became operational in 2022, observed hot gas likely forming a ring around the star following the event and an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene.

"We do know that there is a good amount of material from the star that gets expelled as the planet goes through its death plunge. The after-the-fact evidence is this dusty leftover material that was ejected from the host star," said astronomer Ryan Lau of the U.S. National Science Foundation's NOIRLab, lead author of the study published in the Astrophysical Journal. Reuters