Astronomers spot a planet caught in a disastrous death spiral

A planet far away from Earth is about to die by star.

The exoplanet known as Kepler-1658b is getting short-lived around its host star. Experts say this is the first time in history that they've seen a situation unfold in space.

The discovery was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Monday and shows new information about the demise of many worlds. Billions of years from now, scientists think the sun may destroy Earth in a similar way.

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Theplanet will spiral closer and closer until it crashes into the star, obliterating it. 3 million or less years is how long it will take for that to happen. Orbital decay is the scientific process of the planet's path around its star.

It's a gas giant like our neighboring planet but is much closer to the star it's in than to the sun. Mercury is eight times closer to the sun than the exoplanet is. It takes less than a day for it to travel around the star.

It's difficult to measure the process of finding exoplanets with smaller moons. The lead author of the study found that the trajectory of the telescope was contracting by 131 milliseconds a year. Scientists used the observations of three telescopes to detect that the revolutions of Kepler-1658b had fallen over the last 13 years.

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Scientists think that the same thing that causes oceans to rise and fall is the cause of these waning circles. The push and pull between the planet and moon is what causes it. The interaction with its star is what it is called for. The two objects are pulled closer or farther apart by the force of gravity.

Scientists don't know how these dynamics work.

"Now that we have evidence of inspiraling of a planet around an evolved star, we can begin to refine our models of tidal physics," Vissapragada said. With any luck, there will be many more of these labs with the help of the Kepler-1658 system.