Did you know that planets can disappear? This is proven by a study that appears today in the American scientific journal Nature . A very powerful telescope, ESO, has just found evidence that an exoplanet, which is located in another solar system than ours, several billion kilometers from the Earth, is being sucked by the very star. hot - a "white dwarf", similar to the Sun - which is next to her.
3000 tons less material per second
This giant planet, similar to Neptune, loses 3,000 tons of material per second. Its atmosphere escapes, in the form of impressive quantities of hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur. With an ultra-powerful telescope located in Chile, scientists analyzed the light variations of the white dwarf. And in this way, they found traces of material from the planet, which they had never observed on this type of stars. "We knew something was not going to happen in this system, and we speculated that it could be linked to a global remnant," says Boris Gänsicke, a researcher at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. led the study, in Nature . It was simply the matter the planet was losing as it evaporated, as can be seen in the animation below:
Mercury, Venus and Mars will also disappear
It also shows us what will happen to Earth in 5 billion years. "We have the impression of seeing the future of our solar system," says Anthony Boccaletti, an astrophysicist at the Observatoire de Paris. "We know more or less the outcome: in 5 billion years, there will be more hydrogen in the Sun, so it will increase in size and encompass the orbit of the Earth that will disappear in, it is almost certain. "
But the Earth will not be alone: Mercury, Venus, Mars, rocky planets, will disappear too, engulfed by the Sun.