The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been studying the scene of a dramatic collision between a star and its planet, but whereas astronomers had originally thought that the star was a red giant that engulfed the planet, the JWST has found a very different story: The planet crashed into the star.
In 2020, the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California spotted a distant star — that sits about 12,000 light-years away from us — suddenly brighten in the night sky. When looking back at the star in archival data from NASA's NEOWISE mission, astronomers found that the star, designated ZTF SLRN-2020, had been brightening in infrared light for a year before the optical flash.
