Astronomers saw a star 'sipping' on a nearby planet through a massive cosmic straw.
March 19, 2026
Original Paper
Stars stably accreting from substellar objects
arXiv · 2603.17039
The Takeaway
While we usually expect stars to swallow nearby planets whole, researchers observed two systems where a star is slowly drinking its brown dwarf companion over billions of years. This 'stable mass transfer' proves that some substellar objects survive for eons while being gradually consumed.
From the abstract
Substellar objects such as brown dwarfs and planets are generally expected to remain detached from their main-sequence host stars unless orbital decay or stellar expansion brings them into contact, leading to rapid engulfment and destruction. Such a fate is predicted for the Earth and other rocky planets in our solar system; however, in certain cases, theory also allows for stable long-lived mass transfer from a substellar object onto its main-sequence host, though such accretion has never been