A YOUNG star has been caught in the act of eating a baby planet. This is the first evidence that the building blocks of planets can form quickly, in tens of thousands of years rather than millions.
On 13 October 2003, Jian Ge and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University saw the distant star LkHα 234 swallowing something the size of a large asteroid, about 100 kilometres across. As the body plunged into the star and evaporated, its elements absorbed the star’s yellow light. The astronomers detected this as a sudden change in the brightness of the star, as measured by…
