With a gulp and burp, a bloated star swallows a Jupiter-sized planet

In a glimpse of the dismal fate awaiting Earth, scientists for the first time have observed a star, bloated in its old age, swallowing a Jupiter-like planet, then expelling some material into space in an energetic belch. Mercury, Venus and finally Earth, our solar system's three innermost planets, will meet this destiny as the sun evolves through its red giant phase in about 5 billion years, according to Kishalay De, a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature. The planet in this research was a type called a "hot Jupiter" - a gas giant resembling our solar system's biggest world but with an orbit much tighter to its star. The deeper the planet fell into the star's atmosphere, the denser its surroundings, and the faster it was dragged inward," said study co-author Morgan MacLeod, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Essentially, the star swallowed its planet so suddenly that we got to see its energetic burp," MacLeod said, referring to some material expelled into space in a luminous flare.