Ageing stars may be destroying the giant planets orbiting closest to them, according to a new study by astronomers at UCL and the University of Warwick. Once stars like the Sun run out of hydrogen fuel, they cool down and expand to become red giants. In the Sun’s case this will happen in about five billion years. In the new study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , researchers looked at nearly half a million stars that had just entered this “post-main sequence”