YOUR TIME MACHINE TO THE PAST!
Contact Us: Swapsale@aol.com
SCIENCE
NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)
This is an artist's concept of the exoplanet WASP-12b. It is the hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, and potentially the shortest lived. The planet is only 2 million miles from its sunlike parent star — a fraction of Earth's distance from the Sun.
Star Devouring Hottest-Known Alien Planet
- Space.com
The hottest-known planet in our galaxy is being stretched into the shape of a football and rapidly consumed by its parent star, new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show.
The hottest-known planet in our galaxy is being stretched into the shape of a football and rapidly consumed by its parent star, new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show.
The extrasolar planet on the cosmic menu, called WASP-12b, may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured, Hubble scientists announced Thursday.
WASP-12b is so close to its sun-like star that it is superheated to nearly 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit and stretched into an elongated shape by enormous tidal forces.
Because of those phenomenal forces, the planet's atmosphere has ballooned to nearly three times Jupiter's radius and is pouring material onto its parent star. WASP-12b is 40 percent more massive than Jupiter.
This effect of matter exchange between two stellar objects is commonly seen in close binary star systems, but this is the first time it has been seen so clearly for a planet. The system was observed with the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) instrument on Hubble.
MORE: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/20/star-devours-hottest-known-alien-planet/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------