In about 5 billion years, when the sun reaches the end of its life and engulfs the inner planets of the solar system,
Including our own, astronomers have gotten a sneak peek at what could be Earth's ultimate fate.
This is due to the fact that they have discovered what appears to be a sun-like star gulping an orbiting planet for the first time.
Astronomers observed the star suddenly and briefly brighten during a survey of the sky, increasing in brightness by about 100 times over the course of about 10 days.
A recent report in the journal Nature suggests that what they saw must have been the star ingesting a hot gas giant planet about the size of Jupiter based on subsequent observations.
The lead author of the new study, Kishalay De, a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, says, "It's a bit poetic in that, you know, this is going to be the final fate of the Earth."
Astronomers predict that many of the planets in our galaxy will be swallowed up at the end of their star's evolution, as scientists have recently discovered.