For the first time, astronomers have caught a star devouring one of its planets. Someday our own sun will expand like this star, engulfing the other inner planets, so this system is a kind of preview of the fate of the Earth.

Kishalay De at MIT and colleagues used the Zwicky Transient Facility in California to detect a strange burst of light, designated ZTF SLRN-2020, from a star about 13,000 light-years away. Within about 10 days, it became brighter by about 100 times.

The outburst was similar to a phenomenon called a red nova, caused by the merger of two stars, but it was not as bright and did not release as much energy. By collecting more observations with other telescopes, the researchers found that the data is consistent with the fact that the star is not swallowing another star, but a gas giant planet at least 30 times the mass of the Earth.

We knew that stars ate planets because we saw the consequences of polluting stars with chemicals from the worlds they devoured. “In the past, all the evidence we have that stars eat planets came from observations of stars that did so hundreds of thousands of years ago,” says De. “But we’ve never caught a star red-handed eating a planet.”

This is expected to happen when the sun-like star uses up its hydrogen fuel and switches to helium fusion. In the process, the star becomes a red giant, and its atmosphere expands outward, engulfing any planets that unfortunately orbit too closely. In the case of ZTF SLRN-2020, it took the planet less than one Earth day to orbit its star.

The sun should begin its expansion in about 5 billion years. “In fact, we see how the fate of our own planet in real time happens to another unfortunate planet,” says De. “If you were to observe our solar system from 10,000 light-years away, you would see the Sun also getting brighter in the same way, but the effect would be nowhere near as dramatic because the Earth is much smaller than the Earth. [the planet] is.”

According to De, now that we know what planetary absorption looks like, it will be much easier to search for them and study them in more detail. The researchers calculated that this should happen about once a year in our galaxy, so we should be able to find more planets being devoured by their stars, as well as continue to watch this one and figure out the details of the process – and Earth’s future doom.

There is a shortage of monkeys available for medical research, and the US should expand its breeding programs rather than rely on international suppliers to deal with the problem, a powerful scientific advisory group said Thursday.

Research using non-human primates, especially monkeys, has been critical to life-saving medical advances, including the development of COVID-19 vaccines, due to their resemblance to humans. The US is funding colonies at National Primate Centers, but supplies have been limited and even before the pandemic, more animals were regularly imported.

Then China, once a leading supplier, stopped exporting research monkeys in 2020 as scientists around the world needed more for coronavirus research. And last fall the USA filed charges to stop Cambodian smuggling ring are accused of sending endangered wild monkeys instead of those bred for research, further restricting supplies.

The report, released Thursday, only looked at NIH-funded research deemed key to public health emergency response, not pharmaceutical companies or other publicly or privately funded monkey research.

The country’s preparedness is being undermined by its dependence on imports of these animals, which are especially important for research into infectious diseases and neuroscience, the commission from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said. Highlighting this vulnerability, the US faced a 20 percent drop in imports of one species, the cynomolgus macaque, when China abruptly cut off supplies.

The panel also called for further development of alternatives to testing on monkeys, and in the meantime called for closer collaboration among scientists to make the best use of each research animal.

“If the US wants to conduct high-impact biomedical research and have a research infrastructure capable of responding to the next public health crisis, now is the time to strengthen the systems needed for non-human primate research,” said committee chairman Dr. Kenneth Ramos of Texas A&M University.

The story goes on

The use of animals in biomedical research, especially non-human primates, is controversial. Under pressure, the NIH has already excluded chimpanzees, humans’ closest relatives, from invasive research, but says the need for apes still exists. The report states that primates make up 0.5% of all animals used in biomedical research in the US.

In a survey of NIH-supported researchers, a panel of national academies found that 64% reported problems obtaining non-human primates needed for their jobs, including increased waiting times and costs. The report says that in 2021 the National Primate Research Centers had such a shortage of monkeys never used in previous studies that they could not meet two-thirds of the researchers’ requests.

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