Two years prior, astronomers thought they had witnessed a dying star in the process of consuming a planet — a striking cosmic occurrence taking place 12,000 light-years away from our planet. However, fresh observations are altering that interpretation, attributing the responsibility to the planet instead.

Initially, researchers believed the aging star had transformed into a red giant and enveloped a nearby Jupiter-sized planet. Yet, new findings from the James Webb Space Telescope — a collaborative effort by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency — reveal an alternate narrative.

Instead of being engulfed by an expanding star, the planet seems to have gradually spiraled inward over millions of years, ultimately colliding with the star. In essence, it was the planet’s deteriorating orbit that led to its destruction.

“So the star indeed consumed the planet, just not in the way we first assumed,” remarked Ryan Lau, an astronomer at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, during a conversation with Mashable. “And it was perhaps more the planet’s doing.”

This cosmic event was initially detected five years ago as a sudden flash of visible light, designated ZTF SLRN-2020. Later, astronomers observed that the star had started emitting infrared light a year before, indicating the existence of dust — likely the remnants of a shattered planet.

At that moment, scientists believed the star had transitioned into its red giant phase, a later stage in stellar evolution when stars significantly expand and often engulf nearby planets. This process is anticipated for our own sun and Earth in roughly 5 billion years. However, the infrared observations from the Webb telescope indicated that the star had not experienced a substantial increase in size, casting doubt on the red giant explanation.

Instead, the planet — approximately the size of Jupiter — had been gradually drawn closer to the star. Eventually, it skimmed the star’s outer atmosphere, initiating a runaway process that culminated in a catastrophic collision. The clash produced a spiraling disk of gas and dust, with Webb detecting molecules such as carbon monoxide in the aftermath.

“The planet ultimately began to graze the star’s atmosphere. From that point on, it became a runaway process of falling in faster,” clarified Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “As the planet fell in, it started to sort of smear around the star.”

This occurrence represents the first instance where astronomers have directly witnessed a star consuming a planet in real-time. Previous indications of such events were derived from analyzing the debris of stars long after they transpired. The new discoveries are extensively documented in The Astrophysical Journal.

Unlike massive stars that conclude their lives in dramatic supernova explosions and collapse into black holes, medium-sized stars like our sun have a more gradual death. As they deplete their nuclear fuel, they expel their outer layers, resulting in luminous clouds of gas and dust called planetary nebulae — a misleading term, as planets are unrelated to their formation.

Grasping these processes is complex due to the billions of years that span a single star’s life. Paul Sutter, a professor at Stony Brook University and author of How to Die in Space, articulated in a 2022 interview that scientists reconstruct the life cycles of stars by observing many at various stages of development.

“It’s like taking a snapshot of everyone on Earth at once,” Sutter explained. “You can’t capture an individual’s entire lifetime, but you can see people being born, playing soccer, getting married, and passing away. By putting together these distinct moments, you can reconstruct a person’s life cycle — and that’s how we comprehend the existence and death of stars.”

The Webb telescope’s intricate examination of the aftermath of this planetary collision poses new inquiries about the fate of stars when they consume their planets. Astronomers aim to discover more instances of such phenomena to enhance their understanding of these dramatic cosmic conclusions.