B First ever recorded planetary engulfment

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has observed what is believed to be the first recorded event of a planet being engulfed by a star, revealing a hot accretion disk and a cooler dust cloud. The findings indicate that the planet, approximately Jupiter-sized, experienced orbital decay rather than the star expanding to consume it. The star, cooler and dimmer than the Sun, is not expected to have reached red giant status, supporting the decay theory. The observations suggest that the planet was heavily disrupted by impacts with the stellar atmosphere before its final disintegration. The discussion also highlights the reliance on modeling in interpreting these events, indicating that assumptions may influence the results.
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"NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly decayed over time."

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2025/117/01JR8HQ5MZTSG07EBWNBPYJADH

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Cheers,
Tom
 
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Can you talk us through in a bit more detail what is going on in #3 and #4?
 
More detail here. The planet was roughly Jupiter sized and heavily disrupted by repeated grazing impacts with the stellar atmosphere, which is what's supposed to be depicted in (3). The final impact flung ejecta into space, some of which settled into a ring (4).

Note that the images are artists' impressions, not Webb photos.

Original journal article (which I haven't read yet) here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adb429
 
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The journal article says the star was in the Sun's mass range and the planet was probably less than ten times Jupiter's mass. The star appears to be cooler and dimmer than the Sun, so unlikely to have engulfed the planet as part of an expansion into a red giant. Hence it was probably orbital decay.

The rest of the paper seems to be a lot of modelling talk. There seem to be a good few assumptions feeding into the model, so I suspect the details are rather more model-dependant than the NASA article would suggest. Figure 9 (in section 4) is a less arty version of what their best fit says things look like pre- and post- event.
 
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