Stars like our Sun can eat their own planets! Here is what the study reveals

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Stars make the night sky look beautiful along with the Moon. But stars can sometimes turn dangerous too! According to the latest findings, stars like our Sun can eat their own planets. When the Sun starts dying, it will expand to become a red giant, engulfing the inner planets. And now, according to the latest study done using hydrodynamical simulations has revealed the forces acting on a planet when it is swallowed by an expanding star.

"The results show that the interactions of a substellar body (a planet or brown dwarf) with the hot gas in the outer envelope of a sun-like star can lead to a range of outcomes depending on the size of the engulfed object and the stage of the star's evolution," eurekalert.org said in a release.

“Evolved stars can be hundreds or even thousands of times larger than their planets, and this disparity of scales makes it difficult to perform simulations that accurately model the physical processes occurring at each scale,” said Yarza, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. “Instead, we simulate a small section of the star centered on the planet to understand the flow around the planet and measure the drag forces acting on it,” as quoted in the report.

The results may help explain recent observations of planets and brown dwarfs closely orbiting stellar remnants such as white dwarfs and subdwarfs. "Previous studies have suggested that these systems may be the end result of a planetary engulfment process that involves shrinking of the engulfed body's orbit and ejection of the outer layers of the star," the report said.

“As the planet travels inside the star, drag forces transfer energy from the planet to the star, and the stellar envelope can become unbound if the transferred