Far from our Solar System, astronomers are now watching stars literally consume their own planets, a violent finale that turns abstract theory into something disturbingly concrete. These stellar feasts are not just cosmic curiosities, they are a preview of how Earth’s own story is likely to end when the Sun swells and turns on its inner worlds.
I see these observations as a kind of time machine, letting us watch in real time what will unfold here over billions of years. They show that planet destruction is not rare bad luck, but a built‑in stage of stellar evolution that even a seemingly stable system like ours cannot escape.
When Astronomers Just Saw a Star Eat a Planet
The turning point came when Astronomers Just Saw a Star Eat a Planet for the First Time, catching a dying star suddenly brighten as it swallowed a closely orbiting world. In that event, a sunlike star ballooned to hundreds of times its original diameter, engulfing a planet that skimmed so close it was effectively grazing the stellar surface before vanishing in a burst of light and heat, a sequence captured in detail by Astronomers Just Saw. An artist’s rendering of that doomed world shows it skimming the roiling atmosphere of its host, a visual that matches the physics Astronomers reconstructed from the sudden flare and cooling that followed, as described in a second analysis of the same event by Astronomers.
For the first time, researchers could say with confidence that they were not just seeing a star flare randomly, but a dying sun-like star actively eating an exoplanet, a conclusion drawn using infrared and optical data that tracked the energy of the impact, as summarized in a kid‑friendly explainer that notes this is a direct clue to the fate of our own Solar System, including our planet Earth, in a report titled For the. Follow‑up work showed that the engulfment briefly pumped extra material into the star’s outer layers, a kind of stellar burp that one team described as more star‑ and planet‑forming material being recycled into the interstellar medium, a process they estimated lasts only a few months in each such outburst, according to a technical summary of That’s more star‑ and planet‑forming material.
Planet‑eating giants and the fate of Earth
Those single dramatic events are now being set against a much larger statistical backdrop, as Nov Astronomers analyze hundreds of thousands of aging stars and find that many show chemical fingerprints of devoured planets. One survey of evolved suns concluded that as stars leave the so‑called main sequence stage and swell into red giants, their closest giant planets are often missing, a pattern that strongly suggests they have already been consumed, a result highlighted in a study of Nov Astronomers. Another team, examining half a million stars, reported that giant planets hugging Sun‑like stars rarely survive the red giant phase at all, a conclusion that ByEric Ralls framed as evidence that close‑in worlds are effectively doomed once their hosts start to swell, in work on ByEric Ralls.
In parallel, detailed case studies are filling in the physics of what that doom looks like. One widely discussed system, ZTF SLRN‑2020, sits about 15,000 light‑years away and shows a dying star suddenly brighten as it swallowed a planet, then gradually fade back to normal, a sequence that researchers used to calibrate how much mass and energy such an engulfment involves, as described in a profile of ZTF SLRN. Astronomers from MIT and elsewhere have argued that events like this may occur several times each year throughout the galaxy, turning what once seemed like a rare spectacle into a routine, if brief, phase of stellar aging, a point underscored in a technical release from Astronomers MIT.
Other observers have gone further, calling one such engulfment a sneak peek at Earth’s own death, noting that swallowing the planet whole caused the star to expand and brighten rapidly, and that gas from the star’s atmosphere will eventually drag inner worlds like Mercury, Venus, and Earth into the fire, a scenario laid out in a narrative that urges readers to Follow Morgan McFall‑Johnsen as she explains how Follow Morgan. A separate account of the same system describes how Astronomers observed for first time a star consuming a planet and explicitly linked it to the expectation that the Sun will first engulf Mercury, then Venus, and then Earth, a chain of events that one researcher said provides a stark preview of our own planet’s fate, as detailed in a report on Astronomers Earth.
How long does Earth really have?
For all the drama of these distant catastrophes, the timeline for Earth is measured in billions of years, not human lifetimes. Current models suggest that in approximately 5 billion years, the Sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and expand into a Red Giant, growing so large that its outer layers will engulf the orbits of the inner planets, a sequence summarized in a popular explainer that notes the Sun will ignite new fusion reactions as it puffs up, in a post that states, “In approximately 5 billion years, the Sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and begin expanding into a Red Giant,” as captured in Dec Sun Red Giant. Detailed calculations of tidal interactions suggest that Earth will interact tidally with the Sun’s outer atmosphere, and that Drag from the chromosphere will steadily shrink our orbit until the planet is either incinerated or its surface is stripped away, a grim forecast laid out in a technical overview of the Future of Earth.
Even before that final engulfment, life will face mounting challenges as the Sun brightens with age. One synthesis of stellar evolution work notes that the Expected time of death for complex life is several billion years from now, long before the planet is physically swallowed, because rising solar output will destabilize climate and oceans, a point emphasized in a Q&A that asks how long Earth will exist and answers that Dec Earth Expected. Informal discussions of this future have filtered into everyday culture too, with one viral thread bluntly titled “The Sun will engulf the Earth in 5 billion years” warning that it gets worse, because the sun is getting hotter as it ages and suggesting that in 600 m years the biosphere could already be in serious trouble, a back‑of‑the‑envelope timeline that appears in a post dated Sep 600 m.
What makes the new planet‑eating research chilling is how neatly it slots into this theoretical picture. One recent synthesis framed these aging stars as Planet‑Eating Giants Reveal How Earth Might Meet Its End, arguing that the disappearing close‑in planets around swollen suns are exactly what models predict for our own system once the Sun leaves the main sequence, a narrative that pulls together the statistics and the case studies in Dec Planet Eating Giants Reveal How Earth Might Meet Its End. Another overview, titled Planet‑eating stars offer a glimpse into Earth’s fate as the Sun nears its final stages, describes how Dec Astronomers scrutinizing distant sunlike stars have identified telltale signs that these aging suns gradually consume their inner planets, a pattern that strongly suggests our own Sun will behave the same way, as argued in a report on Dec Astronomers.
Evidence that this is already happening elsewhere in the galaxy keeps piling up. A survey summarized under the headline that a surprising number of stars seem to eat their own planets describes how an international team found chemical traces of engulfed worlds in the atmospheres of many Sun‑like stars, a result that suggests planetary cannibalism is a common outcome rather than a rare accident, as reported in a feature that begins with “Mar” and notes that WITNESS True Crime California Atlanta Just is an unrelated tagline on the same page, in the context of Mar WITNESS True Crime California Atlanta Just. Earlier work on a star called HIP68468 showed that What clued them in is lithium content four times higher than expected for a star about six billion years old, along with an overabundance of elements common in rocky planets, a combination that led researchers to conclude that at least one world had already been swallowed and that inner planets are bound to go first, as detailed in an analysis of Dec What.
Public‑facing explainers have tried to make this endgame more tangible. One short video titled Astronomers catch a star swallowing a planet (for the first time) walks viewers through how stars like the sun run out of fuel, expand to nearly a million times their original volume, and then engulf nearby planets in a fiery embrace, using animations to show the orbits decaying as the star swells, a sequence laid out in Astronomers catch. Another widely shared story, headlined Star first seen swallowing a planet, the “future of Earth,” describes how the stunning act of celestial cannibalism took place 12,000 light‑years away and involved researchers from MIT and Harvard, who emphasized that we are literally watching a preview of our own system’s fate, as recounted in a feature that notes the distance as 12,000 MIT Harvard. For anyone still tempted to see Earth as somehow exempt from cosmic mortality, the message from these planet‑eating stars is blunt: our world is not special, just early in a story whose ending we can already watch unfolding in the skies of other suns.
