For years I have been laying awake at night, and sometimes missing deadlines at work, because of my all-consuming fear that our planet, Earth, might get “eaten” (meaning sucked into the destroying heat) by our sun. Being a long time student of such things, I have known for years that many smaller planets (like Earth) could suffer the same fate as others. Just imagine how Earth or anything like it could form in such a hostile location, where the radiation of the parent star would have pushed the light gas — which makes up most of such a planet’s mass — out to the farthest reaches of the solar system before it…