Hottest planet about to be engulfed by its parent star

The Hubble space telescope caught a glimpse of two things: a. the hottest known planet in our galaxy has a surface temperature of around 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,800 degrees Fahrenheit), and b. it’s about to be engulfed by its parent star.

Scientists predict that the said planet, called WASP-12b, is going to be completely devoured by the star it orbits in ten million years. Researchers used the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to observe the planet’s doomed orbit. According to researchers, gravitational forces have deformed WASP-12b into an elongated shape.

Hottest planet about to be engulfed by its parent star

WASP-12b is about 300 times the size of Earth and is around 600 light-years away. Its orbit is so close to its star in our galaxy’s Auriga Constellation that it completes its orbit in about 24 hours.

The planet’s doom may take a long, long time, though researchers have already observed extreme changes in WASP-12b. Carole Haswell, team leader of The Open University in Great Britain said, “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.”

Another astronomer, Shu-lin Li, had published a paper predicting that the planet’s surfaces “would be distorted by the star’s gravitational pull” and that WASP-12b’s interior temperature will rise further.

WASP-12b may be 600 light-years away, but NASA’s concept art of the observed phenomenon looks too scary to even contemplate happening to Earth.

via [ Yahoo News]

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 11:25 pmand is filed under amazing, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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