A star was wrongly accused of a cosmic crime: devouring its own planet

Two years ago, a star on its deathbed was charged with a heinous act — eating a planet — in a system 12,000 light-years away from Earth. But new evidence has emerged in the case that astronomers say exonerates this elderly Milky Way star of the crime. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a collaboration of NASA and its European and Canadian space counterparts, a team observed that while the planet did die in the belly of a stellar beast, it didn’t go down the way they onc