A star 11,000 light-years away began flickering like a dying bulb. Scientists now believe they watched two worlds vanish in a single, blinding instant.
For a long time, Gaia20ehk looked like the kind of star no one would linger on. It sat about 11,000 light-years away near the constellation Puppis, shining with the steady, predictable light expected from an ordinary main-sequence star. Then, in 2016... [6266 chars]