First glimpse of Earth's fate when the Sun runs out of fuel comes from star that swallows an entire planet

New Delhi. Astronomers have for the first time observed a Sun-like star swallowing a planet bigger than Earth in “one big gulp”, finally confirming a fundamental prediction about stars and their planets.

This new observations paint a picture of the situation that could one day happen in our own Solar System when the Sun begins to run out of fuel and eats inner planets. It is being described as a galactic gobble.

During a survey of the sky, astronomers saw the star suddenly and briefly brighten, becoming about 100 times more luminous over around 10 days. Follow-up observations suggest that what they witnessed must have been the star's ingestion of a hot gas giant planet about the size of Jupiter, according to a new report in the journal Nature.

The star, which started out similar to our sun in size and composition, is located in our Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Aquila. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). The star is around 10 billion years old, twice as old as the sun.

'It’s somewhat poetic in that all of that we see around us, all the stuff that we’ve built around us, this will all be burned in a flash when the Sun decides to evolve and become puffy in 5 billion years,” Kishalay De, the study’s lead author and postdoctoral student at MIT, said in a news conference.

Red giant stars have the capacity to inflate to 100 times their initial size, swallowing any planets in their path. Scientists previously have observed such star expansion but not a planetary engulfment. The sobering future of Earth aside, scientists are impressed with the groundbreaking observation.