First Evidence Discovered of Planet's Destruction by Its Star

The first evidence of a planet's destruction by its aging star has been discovered by an international team of astronomers.The evidence indicates that the missing planet was devoured as the star began expanding into a"red giant" -- the stellar equivalent of advanced age.
"A similar fate may await the innerplanets in our solar system, when the Sun becomes a red giant and expands all the way out to Earth's orbit some five-billion years from now," said Alex Wolszczan, an Evan Pugh Professor of Astronomyand Astrophysics at Penn State, University, who is one of the members of the research team. Wolszczan also is the discoverer ofthe first planet ever found outside our solar system.
The astronomers also discovered amassive planet in a surprisingly elliptical orbit around the same red-giant star, named BD+48 740, which is older than the Sun with a radius about eleven times bigger. Wolszczan and the team's other members, Monika Adamow, Grzegorz Nowak, and Andrzej Niedzielski of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland; and Eva Villaver of the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain, detected evidence of the missing planet's destruction while they were using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope to study the aging star and to search for planets around it.The evidence includes the star's peculiar chemical composition, plus the highly unusual elliptical orbit of its surviving planet.