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Dying Stars Are Eating Giant Planets Close giant planets vanish around older red giants, and the likely explanation is that the stars are eating them. Royal Astronomical Society reporting on UCL and University of Warwick research says close-in giant planets become much rarer around more evolved red giants. The team looked at nearly half a million stars that had recently left the main sequence and found 130 planets and planet candidates in tight orbits. The strange pattern is the drop-off: more evolved red giants hosted close giant planets around only 0.11% of the time, compared with 0.35% around younger post-main-sequence stars. That points to tidal interaction, where the growing star and the planet pull on each other until the planet's orbit shrinks. The planet can spiral inward, break apart, or fall into the star's outer layers, which turns a quiet-looking red giant into a planetary-system wrecking machine. That matters because it gives astronomers a population-level way to measure how stars destroy planets, not just a one-off dramatic event. The future of our own solar system is not the same case, but the result shows why aging stars can radically rearrange the worlds closest to them. The replay frame is the planet's diffuse atmosphere flowing into the star, because the missing planets are the real evidence behind the image.