Back in 2020 astronomers observed a red nova, which while enormously powerful, is on the low side of energetic events in the universe. Now an astronomer has studied the event in close detail and has come to the conclusion that we have just witnessed a star destroying its own planet.
The technical jargon term for these red nova events are “intermediate luminosity optical transits,” or ILOTs. These are extremely rare events to observe, because they only produce a moderate amount of energy. That makes it hard for us to capture them in observations. But despite the rarity of the events, astronomers suspect that they occur very frequently throughout the universe.
For years astronomers have wondered if these red ...
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