The Tale of a Hungry Subgiant and Its Brown Dwarf
This week, The New York Times, published and article entitled “This Star Just Ate a Planet, and It’s Not Done Yet“.
This article features two recent papers astronomy papers. One involving Prof. Melinda Soares-Furtado, “Lithium Enrichment in a Subgiant Star with a Brown Dwarf Companion: A Planetary Engulfment Candidate” and another from WiCOR Members Ritivk Sai Narayan ’26 (now a graduate student at MIT), Prof. Melinda Soares-Furtado, and Prof. Richard Townsend published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, “The Tale of a Hungry Subgiant and Its Brown Dwarf: Interior Radiative Damping Dominates the Tidal Evolution of TOI-5882“
“A major way this work relates to WiCOR is that planetary engulfment acts like a form of cosmic forensics. When a star consumes a planet, traces of the planet’s chemical makeup are left behind in the stellar atmosphere, allowing us to reconstruct its bulk composition. It’s one of the only ways to probe far beneath a planet’s atmosphere and directly investigate the chemistry of its interior.”
Prof. Soares-Furtado