Hubble Finds A Star Eating A Planet

[greengiant912]

The hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy may also be its shortest-lived world. The doomed planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The planet may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured.

 

The planet, called WASP-12b, is so close to its sunlike star that it is superheated to nearly 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit and stretched into a football shape by enormous tidal forces. The atmosphere has ballooned to nearly three times Jupiter's radius and is spilling material onto the star. The planet 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.

 

"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," says team leader Carole Haswell of The Open University in Great Britain.

 

Haswell and her science team's results were published in the May 10, 2010 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

 

A theoretical paper published in the science journal Nature last February by Shu-lin Li of the Department of Astronomy at the Peking University, Beijing, first predicted that the planet's surface would be distorted by the star's gravity, and that gravitational tidal forces make the interior so hot that it greatly expands the planet's outer atmosphere. Now Hubble has confirmed this prediction.

 

WASP-12 is a yellow dwarf star located approximately 600 light-years away in the winter constellation Auriga. The exoplanet was discovered by the United Kingdom's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) in 2008. The automated survey looks for the periodic dimming of stars from planets passing in front of them, an effect called transiting. The hot planet is so close to the star it completes an orbit in 1.1 days.

 

The unprecedented ultraviolet (UV) sensitivity of COS enabled measurements of the dimming of the parent star's light as the planet passed in front of the star. These UV spectral observations showed that absorption lines from aluminum, tin, manganese, among other elements, became more pronounced as the planet transited the star, meaning that these elements exist in the planet's atmosphere as well as the star's. The fact the COS could detect these features on a planet offers strong evidence that the planet's atmosphere is greatly extended because it is so hot.

 

The UV spectroscopy was also used to calculate a light curve to precisely show just how much of the star's light is blocked out during transit. The depth of the light curve allowed the COS team to accurately calculate the planet's radius. They found that the UV-absorbing exosphere is much more extended than that of a normal planet that is 1.4 times Jupiter's mass. It is so extended that the planet's radius exceeds its Roche lobe, the gravitational boundary beyond which material would be lost forever from the planet's atmosphere.

 

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/planet-eater.html

 

 

I wish that was the actual image... Cool nevertheless.

[JBags]

NOM NOM NOM NOM

 

i found it interesting that the heat distorted the entire planet's surface

[Miek]

That's actually pretty interesting.

[ClayMeow]

[LoArmistead]

Awesome!!

 

It's mind-boggling to try and imagine the vastness of the universe. I saw Hubble 3D at the Air and Space Museum IMAX last week, and they ended the show by presenting an image of a newly-forming solar system in the distance taken by the new infrared camera in Hubble, and they said something along the lines of:

 

"This newly forming solar system is 10 billion light years away. In other words, the light that produced the image that Hubble captured last year was emitted some 3.5 Billion years before the earth was even formed."

 

Just trying to digest that statement makes my head hurt. Truly amazing stuff. Light movies pretty damn fast, and I can not even begin to comprehend how far away something has to be for light to take 10 billion years to reach us. Just... bleh.

[potatochobit]

if that was real it would be pretty cool

 

but the real image probably looks like this

 

.>-O

[Miek]

10 billion light years

= 5.88 x10^22 Miles

= 9.46 x10^22 Kilometers

 

Does that help? Although... those are still enormously gigantic numbers.

[molotovdaskwerl]

something just passed my mind, and i think i'm not gonna worry about it, but how do we keep control of the hubble when it's across space, radio waves? internet?

[Miek]

My question is: Is the Hubble Telescope overclocked? If not, it should be. Space should keep it cool.

[GabrielT]

All of this makes the my yard work I have to do, my college fund I don't have and my life in general seem so insignificant I might as well not exist. Honestly, I am a bug stuck to a rock thats getting tossed through space by unimaginable forces I can not possibly hope to control. I am one being, in a universe so vast I can not comprehend it. I can barely comprehend the vastness of my own solar system let only my galaxy. At any moment I could be struck down and the world would not notice, my loved ones would but life would go on.

 

I do not believe it is my fate to be this insignificant being. Why would I be granted the ability to comprehend my insignificance? To simply push me to try harder? Or to keep me down? Whatever the case I will continue to be unimportant to the grand scheme of things until something changes that. If there is a God he may be cruel to me by letting me in on the fact that I am nothing, or maybe he is keeping me humble.

 

I fear death. I will say it, I do not believe strongly enough in anything to be sure what happens when my time is up. It is not for us to know. I don't know if I matter. I probably don't.

 

All of these things, I have an entire life to ponder them so I wont let them rip me apart quite yet.

 

Those are some neat things happening with that planet and the star, but when you really think about it, with the vastness of our universe, does it even matter?

[Miek]

You just got all philosophical.

 

Though I'll admit that I too have pondered just how insignificant I am.

 

Just to think... The highest mountain. The deepest part of the ocean. The most important people that have ever lived. The rich. The poor. Everyone... everything that's EVER happened on Earth means nothing. At least on the scale of the Universe.

[sdy284]

something just passed my mind, and i think i'm not gonna worry about it, but how do we keep control of the hubble when it's across space, radio waves? internet?

cat5e

 

a really long one