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WASHINGTON (AFP) – 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.

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Originally posted by Stegasaurus:
Any life that may have been on that planet was gone long, long ago.

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Originally posted by bluesuncompanyman:

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Originally posted by Stegasaurus:
Any life that may have been on that planet was gone long, long ago.

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There was surely never life on that object. Its mass is 40% greater than Jupiter making it a gas giant, and based on other studies of close orbiting jovians, like 51-Pegasus, it has likely always been a ball of gasious plasma and like nothing we know of in our star system.

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
like BSCM said, it was a failed star

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
Still, stars gotta eat, and now there's just more fusion fuel...

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