The glow from the young star is trillions of times more powerful than that of the sun and has been burning for 85 years. A massive stellar explosion trillions of times more powerful than our sun’s brightest solar flare may have occurred when a star ruptured and swallowed a giant gas giant planet.

A new study may unravel the mystery of why the young protostar FU Ori, located 1,200 light-years from Earth, turned significantly bright about 85 years ago and has yet to dim to its expected brightness. The astronomers hypothesized that the increase in FU Ori’s brightness was the result of material being fed to its surface from the superheated disk of gas and dust around the young star.

Simulations by a team from the University of Leicester showed that an extremely energetic event occurs when a planet ten times the size of Jupiter approaches the growing star. This caused this super-Jupiter to burn in a soup of superheated material swirling around the star, which the team calls “super-evaporation.” Some of the planet’s remnants were then fed into the star.

“Protoplanetary disks are often called nurseries of planets. But we’ve now discovered that these mangers are not the quiet places that the early explorers of the solar system imagined,” he said. “Instead, many—perhaps most—young planets burned down and were literally eaten by their stars in such a state of extreme violence,” he said. and chaotic places.”

Simulation of the destruction of Super Jupiter

In their simulation, Nayakshin and his team modeled a gas giant that formed far from FU Ori when the gravitational instability in the protoplanetary disk caused bits of matter to form “clusters” larger than Jupiter but much smaller than the density of a Solar System gas giant. .

These clumps or planetary grains rapidly approached the protostar. The situation really escalated when the now merging clusters on the young planet reached the equivalent of about 9.3 million miles (15 million kilometers) from the star, about one-tenth the distance between Earth and the Sun. Here, matter in the hot disk of gas and dust, known as the protoplanetary disk, is so hot that the outer layers of the planet’s atmosphere are igniting.

During the simulations, these atmospheric layers were removed and became part of the superheated gaseous soup that formed the protoplanetary disk. Super Jupiter is so close to its star that FU Ori’s gravity creates extreme tidal forces within it, stretching the planet in one direction and compressing it into pieces in a process called spaghettification.

This provides the star at the center of the protoplanetary disk with a large reservoir of fresh material to feast on, increasing its mass and causing significant illumination, triggering a powerful flare.

“This was the first star to experience such a flash,” said Vardan Elbakian, a member of the team and a scientist at the University of Leicester. “We now have several dozen examples of such eruptions from other young stars forming in our corner of the galaxy.”

Elbakian added that although the FU Ori eruption was extreme in both duration and observability compared to normal young stars, the team believes most emerging planetary systems could experience dozens or more similar eruptions while protoplanetary disks are still present. .

“If our model is correct, it could have profound implications for our understanding of the formation of both stars and planets,” Nayakshin said. “Now it is important to understand whether other stellar explosions can really be explained by the same scenario.” Source