Hubble catches planet being devoured

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MJ12

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by its star




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 degrees Celsius (2,800 degrees Fahrenheit).
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-percent 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.
Shu-lin had predicted that the planet's surface would be distorted by the star's gravitational pull, and that gravitational tidal forces would make the interior so hot that it would greatly expand its outer atmosphere.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100524/sc_afp/usscienceastronomy
 
I remember when you used to be cute and innocent. Now you're just fat.
 
Yeah, I read this yesterday. It sounded pretty exciting until I read that it won't actually happen for 10 million years.

It's pretty incredible that the planet is more than 300 times the size of Earth. That's a big damn planet.
 
Unicron1.jpg


WHAT MERE STAR DARES TO CHALLENGE ME
 
VirusType2 said:
Yeah, I read this yesterday. It sounded pretty exciting until I read that it won't actually happen for 10 million years.

It's pretty incredible that the planet is more than 300 times the size of Earth. That's a big damn planet.
Click to expand...

300 times? So the planet was larger than our sun? Crazy.
 
ZT said:
I remember when you used to be cute and innocent. Now you're just fat.
Click to expand...

I eat through the pain.

I always find the concept of viewing astronomy in a future context funny. By the time we see it it's been over for ages.
 
Raziaar said:
300 times? So the planet was larger than our sun? Crazy.
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What? No. You can fit about a million earths inside our Sun, and about 1300 earths inside Jupiter. What are you talking about?
 
AKIRA said:
What? No. You can fit about a million earths inside our Sun, and about 1300 earths inside Jupiter. What are you talking about?
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I didn't know, myself. According to wiki,
It has a diameter of about 1,392,000 kilometers (865,000 mi) (about 109 Earths), and its mass (about 2 × 1030 kilograms, 330,000 times that of Earth) accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_sun

So the doomed planet is close to 3 times bigger than our Sun.
 
We still have time to rescue them...I mean by the time we get there they're goners!

shit
 
AJ Rimmer said:
But a lot less mass.
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Yeah, I know that. A lot less. Heh.

Tyguy said:
that's not even close to accurate...in 2006 the largest planet known was only 1.4 times the size of jupiter.



ever heard of binary stars?
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Why did they say the planet was over 300 times larger than Earth then? Our sun is only slightly over 100 times larger. I think Virus posted the exact number of 109. I mean... they seperately mentioned mass and size... so they obviously weren't talking about mass.



"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-percent greater than that of Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system."
 
Yeah, it seemed fishy. I was about to say that this article on the doomed planet sounds... wrong.

WASP-12b is an extrasolar planet, discovered by the SuperWASP planetary transit survey orbiting the star WASP-12. Its discovery was announced on April 1, 2008.[1] Due to its extremely close orbit to its star, its radius is 79% larger than Jupiter's and its mass 41% larger.[2]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-12b

size comparison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Exoplanet_Comparison_WASP-12_b.png

An international group of astrophysicists has determined that a massive planet outside our Solar System is being distorted and destroyed by its host star – a finding that helps explain the unexpectedly large size of the planet, WASP-12b
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Some mechanism must be responsible for expanding this planet to such an unexpected size, say the researchers. They have focused their analysis on tidal forces, which they say are strong enough to produce the effects observed on WASP 12b.
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On Earth, tidal forces between the Earth and the Moon cause local sea levels rise and fall modestly ll twice a day. WASP-12b, however, is so close to its host star that the gravitational forces are enormous. The tremendous tidal forces acting on the planet completely change the shape of the planet into something similar to that of a rugby or American football.

These tides not only distort the shape of WASP 12-b. By continuously deforming the planet, they also create friction in the its interior. The friction produces heat, which causes the planet to expand. “This is the first time that there is direct evidence that internal heating (or ‘tidal heating’) is responsible for puffing up the planet to its current size,” says Lin.
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http://www.kavlifoundation.org/kavli-news/KIAA-WASP-12b
 
AKIRA said:
What? No. You can fit about a million earths inside our Sun, and about 1300 earths inside Jupiter. What are you talking about?
Click to expand...

When people talk about planet sizes, they usually mean diameter. But comparing diameters of planets is much different than comparing volume.

The sun is 109 times the size of Earth, diameter wise. But its volume is over 161878 (or (109/2)^3) times the volume of Earth.

This is because diameter is a one dimensional term, yet if you talk about planet size in terms of volume, that's three dimensional. So the "times" factor is put to the power of 3. If sphere A has x times the radius of sphere B, then sphere A has x^3 times the volume of sphere B.

Same applies to two dimensional objects, except the factor is 2. If square A has x times the width of square B, then its area is x^2 times larger.
 
In most cases planets that revolve very close to their suns tend to be massive gas giants several times larger than Jupiter...there was a reason for why it's so common but I forgot what it was.
 
Yeah, orbiting that close to my parent star tends to give me gas, too.

Planetary destruction fart joke five.

emot-hfive.gif
 
i don't what what the hell is going on here...the planet is not bigger than the star, diameter-wise or other.

your first clue was the picture of the giant star and the smaller planet in the article.
 
Tyguy said:
i don't what what the hell is going on here...the planet is not bigger than the star, diameter-wise or other.

your first clue was the picture of the giant star and the smaller planet in the article.
Click to expand...

Bigger than OUR star.
 
Raziaar said:
Bigger than OUR star.
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That isn't true though. By volume alone earth would fit inside Jupiter over 1300 times and Jupiter into the sun around 1,000.

Gaseous planets can get larger than rocky planets, but even a large gassy planet can't exceed a certain mass by which deuterium fuses...usually creating a brown dwarf or failed star.
 
Tyguy said:
That isn't true though. By volume alone earth would fit inside Jupiter over 1300 times and Jupiter into the sun around 1,000.

Gaseous planets can get larger than rocky planets, but even a large gassy planet can't exceed a certain mass by which deuterium fuses...usually creating a brown dwarf or failed star.
Click to expand...

All I'm going by is what the article says... that it is over 300 times larger than earth.. wheras our sun is only 109 times larger than earth.

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.
Click to expand...



Though according to wikipedia, the size is only a bit bigger than jupiter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-12b

So the article is wrong. An extra 0 maybe. Or maybe they're talking about something other than diameter. I mean, it could be mass, it could be volume. I don't know.

800px-Exoplanet_Comparison_WASP-12_b.png
 
Tyguy said:
i don't what what the hell is going on here...the planet is not bigger than the star, diameter-wise or other.

your first clue was the picture of the giant star and the smaller planet in the article.
Click to expand...

Could explain the amount of time it's taking to fully devour the entire planet.
 
I already posted the explanation. It's not entirely clear why it's so massive, but this is what they believe:

The tremendous tidal forces acting on the planet completely change the shape of the planet into something similar to that of a rugby or American football.

These tides not only distort the shape of WASP 12-b. By continuously deforming the planet, they also create friction in the its interior. The friction produces heat, which causes the planet to expand. “This is the first time that there is direct evidence that internal heating (or ‘tidal heating’) is responsible for puffing up the planet to its current size,” says Lin.
Click to expand...
 
Okay, something is wrong here. The article must be mistaken, saying it's over 300 times the size of Earth.

Here's the wiki article for the planet in question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-12b

According to that, the radius is about 127970 KM. Earth's radius is about 6371 KM.

That's only about 20 times the size of earth.
 
Maybe they're talking about the mass, and got the wording wrong.
 
Vegeta897 said:
Okay, something is wrong here. The article must be mistaken, saying it's over 300 times the size of Earth.

Here's the wiki article for the planet in question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-12b

According to that, the radius is about 127970 KM. Earth's radius is about 6371 KM.

That's only about 20 times the size of earth.
Click to expand...
Who gives a shit. It's larger than jupiter, and over 1200 earths could fit inside jupiter
 
Why do you tell me 'who gives a shit' and then proceed to state a useless fact?
 
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