I have worked with a lot of editors over the years and some of them are obviously better than others. And some … well, some take my weird jokes and not only keep them in, but use them to promote the stories on publication. This article includes a couple of those weird jokes.

Planet-Eating Stars Hint at Earth’s Ultimate Fate

A sampling of aging Sun-like stars demonstrates that they likely eat their closest planets.

For AGU Eos:

Our Sun is about halfway through its life, which means Earth is as well. After a star exhausts its hydrogen nuclear fuel, its diameter expands more than a hundredfold, engulfing any unlucky planets in close orbits. That day is at least 5 billion years off for our solar system, but scientists have spotted a possible preview of our world’s fate.

Using data from the TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) observatory, astronomers Edward Bryant of the University of Warwick and Vincent Van Eylen of University College London compared systems with stars in the main sequence of their lifetimes—fusing hydrogen, like the Sun—with post–main sequence stars closer to the end of their lifetimes, both with and without planets.

“We saw that these planets are getting rarer [as stars age],” Bryant said. In other words, planets are disappearing as their host stars grow old. The comparison between planetary systems with younger and older stars makes it clear that the discrepancy does not stem from the fact that the planets weren’t there in the first place: Elderly stars just get hungry.

Read the rest at AGU Eos.