Star Devouring Planet. scary?

May 25, 2010

Star devouring planet

The doomed planet may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured. -- PHOTO: AFP

WASHINGTON - THE Hubble space telescope has discovered a planet in our galaxy in the process of being devoured by the star that it orbits, according to a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The doomed planet, dubbed WASP-12b, has the highest known surface temperature of any planet in the Milky Way - around 1,500 deg C. But it could be enveloped by its own parent star over the next ten million years, the paper's authors have concluded.

Using a new instrument called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph that was installed on Hubble in 2009, the researchers observed how the planet was whipped into an elongated shape by gravitational forces.

'We see a huge cloud of material around the planet, which is escaping and will be captured by the star. We have identified chemical elements never before seen on planets outside our own solar system,' team leader Carole Haswell of The Open University in Great Britain said.

Discovered in 2008, WASP-12b is located about 600 light-years from Earth in the Auriga Constellation and is more than 300 times the size of Earth. It also has a mass 40 per cent greater than that of Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system.

It is so close to its parent star that it orbits it in little more than 24 hours. Astronomers already knew that stars will swallow a planet that comes too close to it, but this is the first time that the phenomenon has been observed so clearly. The paper, which was published in the May 10 edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms a theoretical paper published in the journal Nature last Friday by Shu-lin Li, an astronomer at Peking University in Beijing. -- AFP

Six hundred light-years from Earth, a huge exoplanet circling close to its home star is slowly, inexorably being devoured.

WASP 12B orbits just 2 million miles from its star, which means the surface of the planet reaches temperatures over 2,800 Fahrenheit. The sun's gravitational pull is stronger on the front surface of the planet than on the back, so the planet has been pulled into a football shape. If you were floating on the gaseous planet, and looking heavenward, the sun would take up nearly the entire sky.

And in the next 10 million years, the star that so dominates the planet will destroy it, according to a paper published in May in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

It's not exactly the kind of solar system that human beings anticipated finding in the great beyond.

"All sorts of things that we would never expected to find we're finding," said Carole Haswell, an astronomer at The Open University in Great Britain who is heading up the work. "Our preconceptions about what planetary systems might look like were shaped by what our own solar system looked like, particularly Star Trek," she joked.

She and her team used the Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to investigate the planet by looking in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum.

"The near ultraviolet is a very sensitive probe to the presence of stuff and that allows you to deduce an effective radius for the planet," she said