A planet spiralling into dying star may tell us about how Earth will be destroyed

Our Sun may appear bountiful as it supports all life on Earth. But even it has a limited life-span. About five billion years from now, the fuel within the Sun will be spent and the Sun will start expanding. And it will certainly spell doom for planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.However, there are many theories about the grim fate of our Solar System and exactly how the Earth will meet its end (or will it?) is still being discussed in the scientific community.

A new observation of a planet spiralling into a dying star may help us understand and predict what can be the Earth's fate when the only star that sustains it begins to die.

In a new study published on Monday (December 19), a team of mostly US-based researchers said they hope the doomed exoplanet Kepler-1658b can help shed light on how worlds die as their stars get older.

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Kepler-1658b, which is 2,600 light years from Earth, is known as a "hot Jupiter" planet.

The planet is similar in size to Jupiter. However, it revolves around its dying star in an orbit one-eighth the distance between Mercury and the Sun. This makes it far hotter than Jupiter in our Solar System.

Kepler-1658b's orbit around its host star takes less than three days -- and it is getting shorter by around 131 milliseconds a year, according to the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"If it continues spiralling towards its star at the observed rate, the planet will collide with its star in less than three million years," said Shreyas Vissapragada, a postdoc at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the study's lead author.

"This is the first time we've observed direct evidence for a planet spiralling towards its evolved star," he told AFP.

So could Earth be heading towards a similar doom?

"Death-by-star is a fate thought to await many worlds and could be the Earth's ultimate adios billions of years from now as our Sun grows older," the Center for Astrophysics said in a statement.

Vissapragada said that "in five billion years or so, the Sun will evolve into a red giant star".

While the tidally-driven processes seen on Kepler-1658b "will drive the decay of the Earth's orbit towards the Sun," that effect could be counter-balanced by the Sun losing mass, he said.

"The ultimate fate of the Earth is somewhat unclear," he added.

Kepler-1658b was the first exoplanet ever observed by the Kepler space telescope, which launched in 2009. However it took nearly a decade of work before the planet's existence was confirmed in 2019, the Center for Astrophysics said.

Over 13 years, astronomers were able to observe the slow but steady change in the planet's orbit as it crossed the face of its host star.

(With inputs from agencies)

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