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Planetary Engulfment Illustration

An illustration of a star after it has swallowed its own planet. The star look like an orange globe with flares coming out of various sides. A dark orange horizontal ring of material circles the host star. There is a very transparent cloud of blue dust spread out from the star.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly decayed over time.

This illustration depicts the sequence of events that took place over millions of years, based on observations from Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRSpec (NIR-Infrared Spectrograph).

Panel 1: The planet was about Jupiter-sized, and orbited very close to the star – even closer that Mercury’s orbit around our Sun.

Panel 2: The planet’s orbit slowly shrank, or decayed, over time, and the planet approached the star. It eventually started to graze the star’s atmosphere. As the planet was falling in, it smeared around the star.

Panel 3: The planet was engulfed by the star completely, and blasted gas away from the outer layers of the star.

Panel 4: As that gas expanded and cooled off, the heavy elements in this gas condensed into cold dust over the next year. There is a hot circumstellar disk of molecular gas closer to the star.

  • Release Date
    April 10, 2025
  • Science Release
    NASA Webb’s Autopsy of Planet Swallowed by Star Yields Surprise
    Read the release
  • Credit
    Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)

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  • Full Res - Four Panels "Artist Concept" watermarked (Print), 3840 × 2160
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  • Full Res - Four Panels (Print), 3840 × 2160
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  • Full Res - Panel 1 (Print), 3840 × 2160
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  • Full Res - Panel 2 (Display), 3840 × 2160
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  • Full Res - Panel 4 (Display), 3840 × 2160
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  • Half Res - Four Panels, 1920 × 1080
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  • Half Res - Panel 3, 1920 × 1080
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  • Half Res - Panel 4, 1920 × 1080
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Details

Last Updated
Aug 28, 2025
Contact
Media

Laura Betz
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
laura.e.betz@nasa.gov

Illustration Credit

NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)

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