Astronomers have witnessed the intense burst of light from a planet being swallowed by its host star, the same dramatic fate that awaits Earth when the sun expands rapidly near the end of its life.

It is the first time researchers have captured the moment when an ageing star swells so much that a nearby planet starts to skim the surface, sending streams of gas and dust into space, before finally plunging into the fiery depths.

“Like a lot of discoveries in science, this happened to be an accidental discovery that really opened our eyes to a new type of phenomenon,” said Kishalay De, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This is going to be the final fate of Earth.”

The first hint of the cosmic catastrophe came in 2020 when De spotted a burst of light amid observations taken by the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Obs