NASA's TESS satellite has discovered three giant planets on the brink of destruction

In all known worlds, three Jupiter-sized gas giants discovered by a NASA satellite could be the first to be swallowed up and destroyed by their own stars, CNET reported.

These unstable planets are called TOI-2337b, TOI-4329b, and TOI-2669b. Each orbits a subgiant or giant star. In fact, the researchers say, TOI-2337b will be swallowed up by its host star within the next million years. While this may seem long, it's just a blink of an eye on the universe's timescale, making the planet the most dangerous world we know of.

"These findings are critical to understanding a new area of exoplanet research: how planetary systems evolve over time," Samuel Grunblatt, a postdoc at the American Museum of Natural History and the Flatiron Institute, said in a statement last week. "These observations provide a new window into how planets approach the end of their lives before their host stars swallow them up."

Grunblatt is the lead author of a paper outlining the discovery, which will be published in the forthcoming Journal of Astronomy.

The three threatened gas giants were discovered in images taken by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in 2018 and 2019.

The researchers' current understanding is that the final phase of the solar system's life could be chaotic as stars expand and heat their planets, while also changing their orbits, increasing the likelihood of catastrophic collisions. Eventually, the entire system could collapse and be swallowed up by stars.

Scientists say they will continue to use TESS and other tools, such as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, to monitor this and other similar planetary systems.

Nick Saunders, co-author of the study, said: "We expect to find dozens to hundreds of such evolved transiting planetary systems through TESS, providing new details about how planets interact, expand and migrate around stars, including stars like our sun." ”