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 and the lead author on the new paper. “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. WASP 12B has a puffed up atmosphere that its star is siphoning off. That observation happily matches theoretical predictions made just a few months ago by astronomer Shu-lin Li at Peking University, Beijing. The confirmation shows yet again that exoplanetology, particularly the study of other solar systems not just individual planets, is advancing at a breakneck pace. “It is a really nice example of theorists predicting something and we’d already observed something close to what they predicted,” Haswell said. Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/05/star-devours-planet/#ixzz0oWCjVR1X
Man, science is so much more interesting than creationism that can just use the same 3000 year old quotes over and over.
I wonder how many people will read this article and think that the picture at the top is a real image taken by the Hubble Telescope, lol...
Man, it's awesome that God spoke into being stuff that takes us a big frickin' telescope in space to see.
What the fuck, Hubble? Don't just sit around like a dumbass! DO SOMETHING! Shoot that shit! Help them! Wait... I just... To... Aw, what?!
It's gotta be the Obama Administration not helping foreigners. We do nation-building, not planet-building.
CHCHCCHeck it out. http://www.omsi.edu/visit/omnimax Hubble Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio Tue.-Thur.: 11:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m. Fri.-Sat.: 11:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m. Sun.: 11:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m. Journey through distant galaxies to explore the grandeur and mysteries of our celestial surroundings in this inspiring and unique look at the Hubble Space Telescope. Narrated by Academy Award nominee Leonardo DiCaprio, Hubble explores the space telescope's legacy and profound impact on astronomy. One of NASA's longest and most successful science missions, the telescope has transmitted hundreds of thousands of images back to Earth, helping scientists tackle questions ranging from the age of the universe and the identity of quasars to the nature of dark energy. Hubble movie-goers are offered a first-hand view of the final NASA visit to the telescope as IMAX cameras document the May 2009 servicing flight by the space shuttle Atlantis. During the mission, astronauts conducted five spacewalks in order to install two new instruments and repair two others, extending the telescope's life until at least 2014. Produced by IMAX and Warner Bros. Pictures in cooperation with NASA, Hubble is presented exclusively in IMAX theaters.
