Okay, okay, I know. A lot of you would have preferred I went with Galactus, but I've never been a Marvel Comics guy. Or a DC Comics guy, for that matter. But when I was a kid, Marvel published Transformers comics, and I'm definitely a Transformers kind of guy. So you're stuck with Unicron.
File this one under the world (or perhaps I should say the universe in this case) is a strange fuckin' place.
Many years ago I wrote a story called "Evolutionary Transubstantiation," which was eventually published by the Art Times (you can read it here on page 11). Before they took it, I'd sent it to Analog, where I got a nice reject letter back. I mean that, I'm not being an asshole. The editor, who didn't often take the time to write personal notes, decided to inform me that the ending of my story couldn't have happened because our sun isn't going to supernova. It's going to expand and swallow the earth, instead. I found that exceptionally helpful, but at the same time, I write fiction. I kept the ending due to artistic license. But now I knew that not every star ends their lives with supernovas.
Which brings me to the James Webb Telescope. I love this thing. We're making all sorts of great observations about the universe with the most sophisticated equipment we can come up with at this time. And it recorded the death of a planet 12,000 lightyears away.
THE FUCKING PLANET WAS EATEN.
If you're looking at a star in the night sky, you are seeing the past. It took however many lightyears to get to you, so it's essentially a window into the past, so this planet died 12,000 years ago if we're just seeing it now.
The universe is a fuckin' strange place.
The planet in question strayed a little from its orbit, but it was enough to get sucked into the star's orbit. Then, over the course of who knows how long, it got closer and closer to the star until the star flared and ate that planet whole.
This is a great article on the matter. Also, keep in mind that this planet was apparently the size of Jupiter. As a point of reference, Jupiter is about as big as 1,300 earths.
Typically when a planet breaks from its orbit (much like Cybertron at the beginning of the Marvel Transformers comics), it becomes a rogue planet, wandering throughout the cosmos. In this case the planet revolved too closely around the sun, so when it broke free, it got stuck immediately. Out of the frying pan, into the 10,000-degree Fahrenheit fire. I imagine something similar would happen if Mercury slipped loose from its orbit in our own solar system.
I wish the footage of this was public, though. That article has an artist's rendering, which looks pretty cool, but I wish I could have watched a whole planet get devoured before my very eyes. You don't see that every day, not even in this strange fuckin' universe.
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