Astronomers just saw a star eat a planet (May 2023)

phys.org

18 points8bitsrule4 comments

>over the span of a week

Wow, a planet is gone and the star size increases x100 in a week!

Size? It brightened!

It does say the star expanded in the video though, but if it was expanded x100 times in a week that would be crazy, probably defying the physics that we know.

did you read the whole article? I swear I read it brightened 100x, which is not indicative of an increase in size or mass just of an enormous light surge via explosion in this case.

> It then slowly started to fade back toward its normal brightness

Seems it was just a blip of brightness. Mass probably increased a little because it did devour a gas giant but I'm guessing it's not a lot compared to the original mass, but I'm not an astrophysicist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com