Astronomers have found evidence that a star has swallowed a planet and say the same fate could befall Earth.
There is still time for that, and it could happen in about five billion years, the BBC announced, referring to the work published in the journal "Astrophysical Journal Letters".
A team of scientists from the United States, Poland and Spain discovered the planet-eating star BD+48 740 by observing it with the Hobby Eberly telescope from the McDonald Observatory in Texas.
"The evidence that BD+48 740 swallowed the planet lies in its special chemical composition, but also in the unusual orbit of the neighboring, surviving planet," writes the BBC.
Spectroscopic analysis showed that BD+48 740 has a large amount of lithium, a rare element created primarily during the Big Bang 14 billion years ago.
Lithium is easily destroyed in stars and is rarely found in such high abundance in stars that are near the end of their evolution, and BD+48 740 is near the end because it is a red giant star.
A red giant is a low- or moderate-mass star that is at the end of its evolution. Rising temperatures at the core of red giants cause the growth of these old stars and they then destroy the surrounding planets.
Another proof, as the BBC writes, that BD+48 740 swallowed the planet, astronomers found in the highly elliptical orbit of the newly discovered planet around it.
Study co-author Andrej Niedzielski of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland explained that such "eccentric" orbits as this one are unusual in a planetary system of evolved stars.
"In fact, the orbit of the planet in the neighborhood of BD+48 740 is the most elliptical we have seen so far," Niedžielski said.
"A similar fate could one day befall the planets of the solar system. It will happen when the Sun enters the red giant phase and expands so much that it reaches the Earth and engulfs it," said Professor Alexander Volschan of Pennsylvania State University.
Iapk, as he said, "some five billion years from today" will pass by then, he said.
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