Star Just Ate a Planet, and It's Not Done Yet

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/science/space/planetary-engulfment-hungry-star.html

by wglb • 13 days ago

43 61 13 days ago

nytimes.com

rgrieselhuber• 13 days ago

"Just"

senectus12• 13 days ago

https://archive.md/CtsG6

opengrass• 13 days ago

We must prevent our sun from doing this by eating less meat and paying more taxes.

SkiFreeWin3• 13 days ago

Good point, clearly a solar system with too many liberals and no second amendment.

gchamonlive• 13 days ago

While the sun has nothing to the with the rest, >500g a week of red meat is linked to intestinal cancer[1][2] and the billionaires should be paying more taxes if you asked me

[1]https://www.wcrf.org/preventing-cancer/topics/meat-and-cance... [2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088...

jmyeet2• 13 days ago

It's really the plastic straws that are the problem. That and avocado toast. And in 1-2 billion years when the Sun has heated up the Earth such that it's uninhabitable anyway (or 100 years at the rate we're going), we can at least feel comfort in all the shareholder value we've created along the way.

senectus12• 13 days ago

its eating the cats, its eating the dogs, its eating the all the things...

taneq2• 12 days ago

We must stop it, for the sake of the kittens and the puppies.

owlninja• 13 days ago

I love stories like this. A subtle reminder how inconsequential our actions are on this planet in the grand, unplanned scheme. I look forward to reading HN with my breakfast each morning then going to a job that helps me raise a family and have fun on the weekends. I read stories of war, corruption, sadistic leaders, and great suffering. I've learned to appreciate the joys of life and have come to terms that we are not here for a long time - just for a good time.

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."

-Bill Watterson

im3w1l• 13 days ago

There is a pretty significant chance that ours will be a starfaring civilization and that our children will reshape the very heavens.

blightful• 13 days ago

Very doubtful when you really dig into what is involved. We probably will never make it out of the solar system. To another star is a pipe dream. We will wreck our planet soon enough and the likely outcome is our species will go extinct. This will probably happen in the next few thousand years or sooner.

kibwen• 13 days ago

If by "children" you mean self-replicating viral robot swarms, then maybe. Nothing biologically descended from humans will ever leave the heliosphere in any form that could be considered living.

excalibur• 13 days ago

Our kids can't change a tire.

stouset4• 13 days ago

I suppose zero is a pretty significant number.

Without new physics that isn’t even remotely visible on the horizon and that utterly contradicts most of what we believe to be true, this isn’t going to happen. Robotic AI probes sent to other star systems to send back telemetry? Sure, fine. Flesh bags sent to self-replicate on terraformed worlds out in the stars? Not a whisper of a microscopic chance.

altmanaltman2• 13 days ago

Even if you colonize the entire solar system or even the entire galaxy, you will still be insignificant in terms of the universe. Also there is a pretty significant chance we destroy ourselves before any of that happens.

bellowsgulch• 13 days ago

A subtle reminder how inconsequential our actions are on this planet in the grand, unplanned scheme.

I don't like that our culture has developed statements like this.

Every single action you make on planet Earth is more consequential and impactful than the countless parsecs of worthless unobtainable space dust that astrophysicists and science promoters like to glaze over.

Space is nothing compared to the unfathomable amount of synaptic connections in your brain, or the impact you can have on someone's life by hugging them.

Let's piss away all the small blue dot sentiments. They're old and pointless.

Micrococonut• 13 days ago

Well said

dylan6043• 13 days ago

You can think they are old and pointless, but that's you just brushing off the fact that the universe is much much older than however old you think these ideas are. The entirety of the human species from its beginning to its eventual ending is merely a blip of time for the universe.

You can argue that makes it that much more special, but so what? To the universe, there very well could have been numerous other specials that have come and gone.

Being unable to accept that is pointless.

jmyeet2• 13 days ago

One of the first gravitational wave detections by LIGO was I think the merger of two black holes or maybe a black hole and a neutron star. It was over a billion light years away I think but was so energetic that it conveted approximately 5 Solar masses into energy in about one second. That's ~10^48 Joules. In 1 second that is ~10^48 Watts.

For comparison, the Milky Way has an estimate of 5x10^36 Watts so we're talking about the energy output, very briefly, of roughly a trillion Milky Way galaxies.

The other that gets me is amgnetars. These are neutron stars with an insane magnetic field. The strongest detected exceeds 1 billion Tesla, making is 30 trillion times stronger than Earth's magnetic field. Get too close and it would flatten atoms and ultimately break molecular bonds and rip electrons out of your body. Google seems to think that happens at ~1000km, which is pretty close to get to a neutron star but still, that's a magnetic field.

These things are quite rare and quite unstable. If you think about it, they must have a lot of protons to generate a field so strong, which means that the gravity is overcoming the strong nuclear force but also the electric repulsion.

pdonis2• 13 days ago

If you think about it, they must have a lot of protons to generate a field so strong

Not necessarily. Neutrons have a magnetic moment. As I understand it, there is a magnetohydrodynamic model of how a magnetar's field gets generated, which would require protons, but it's not the only model and we don't have enough data to be able to rule out other models.

Waterluvian• 13 days ago

Just don’t think about all the suffering you or I could ease with the money we spend on a “good time.”

We’re not the good guys. We rationalize the inescapable selfishness placed there by ages of evolution.

BuyMyBitcoins• 13 days ago

Some of the proceeds spent on having a good time will go towards reducing misery and suffering elsewhere.

I see no malice in the decision to make peace with the fact that no mere mortal is capable of putting a dent into the level of suffering around the world as a whole.

Living one’s life reasonably and not being a burden is remarkably beneficial to society. At the very least, it’s one less unhappy and broke individual.

bigDinosaur• 13 days ago

If having a 'good time' makes me a bad guy then I'm sorry to say but I'm okay with that. I, of course, don't actually agree that that's true.

MichaelRo• 13 days ago

> Just don’t think about all the suffering you or I could ease with the money we spend on a “good time.”

Look man. I am not responsible for any random person or creature that suffers in this world. Lamentations like this ("ease all the suffering") originate in a primate brain that hasn't yet processed that we're no longer a tribe of 100 but there's 10 billion people in this world. Objectively you don't have resources to help more than a few people. And morally, you aren't obligated either.

And btw, I actually do help a person in need, every month with a substantial amount of money. Unlike the occasional act of kindness, helping a complete stranger on a recurring basis is a much harder nut to swallow. Makes you progress really quickly from superficial platitudes like the one you said to the hard, cold reality of the fact that you're losing resources and resources are finite. And that on top of half my income that the state grabs and mostly hands out as welfare anyway. So don't tell me I'm not paying to ease suffering, want or not, I pay through my teeth.

tartoran• 13 days ago

Things can be meaningless on a cosmic timescale and still matter a great deal on a human one. Most of us will never influence the universe, but we'll influence our families, friends, coworkers and even future generations, that's enough...

Cider9986• 13 days ago

I'm reminded of:

What It’s Like Being Married to Neil deGrasse Tyson - Key & Peele

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyZSBqQ813c

gorgoiler• 13 days ago

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

altmanaltman2• 13 days ago

The star is also pretty insignificant compared to the whole universe to be honest. Almost everything is at that scale.

And I mean okay, alien intelligence life must be very smart and not contact us because we are so evil and petty and self involved etc. And every single living species we encounter is also the same. Why are we grandstanding these aliens? They are likley sipping coffee in their corner of universe and wondering man why do we keep doing all this nonsense when we are so insignificant etc. That is far more likely to me than aliens who know we exist but willingly stay away because we are humans.

jjav• 13 days ago

A subtle reminder how inconsequential our actions are on this planet in the grand, unplanned scheme.

I don't find that to be useful at all.

Yes of course, all the suffering on Earth is nothing but a footnote in 0.000000001 font size as far as the universe is concerned.

But that's irrelevant. We live on Earth, so what happens here is actually 100% of what matters. Everything else is inconsequential.

lenkite• 12 days ago

Until we discover a Rogue Black Hole speeding towards our Solar System.

jojogeo• 12 days ago

I'm not a religious person but this seems relevant to your comment;

So I commended the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be merry.

As someone with autism and ADHD; I have spent my life trying to understand better ways to do things, optimisations, doing things "right" or "better" or "faster", and trying to come to terms with others who don't really give a shit about any of it.

The conclusion I arrived at is that the snapshot of time I get in this form is best spent enjoying what this form has to offer, nothing more.

- My sausage'y shaped fingers can't manipulate time or gravity; but they can tickle my children and make them laugh.

- My heart can't fix anything; but it can help me to understand others suffering and guide my actions.

- My eyes can't see the whole electromagnetic spectrum; but they can appreciate a beautiful vista and fill me with wonder.

When TFA mentions that a star just ate a planet, I remember just how small and unimportant I am outside a tiny speck of the world; and rejoice that I'm not responsible for anything super important outside that little speck. \o/

yieldcrv• 13 days ago

Mogged

Herring• 13 days ago

This is like your typical 2-story US house "eating" a baseball. Completely trivial occurrence, cosmologically speaking, unless you're specifically looking for it.

dylan6043• 13 days ago

To me, the fact that we can look at it is what's neat here. People have been theorizing how things work/behave in the universe, and we are finally starting to make observations to test those theories.

mproud• 13 days ago

It just happened 1300 of years ago! (Reminds me of an episode of Flight of the Conchords.)

But it is really interesting to read.

gpm• 13 days ago

It happened sometime between whenever we observed it and 2600 years ago. It's equally valid to say that light travels from there to here instantly (but takes twice as long on the outbound trip) or the reverse. Taking the average is just a convention.

Hence why the articles title - which is based on when the light cone of the event reaches us - is actually the better way to think about it. At least there's no "depends how you feel like defining the speed of light today" in it.

nephihaha• 13 days ago

It depends if you consider 1300 years ago to be "just a moment" ago. Whatever we are seeing there is old news.

Star Just Ate a Planet, and It's Not Done Yet

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