NASA Hubble spots star devouring universe's hottest planet

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It must be something like eating the universe's largest and hottest Ghost Pepper. An instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a planet that is slowly being eaten by its parent star.

The doomed Jupiter-sized planet has moved so close to its sun-like parent star that it is spilling its atmosphere onto the star. This happens because the planet gets so hot that its atmosphere expands to the point where the star's gravity pulls it in. The planet will likely be completely devoured in 10 million years, according to a Space Telescope Science Institute release.

NASA telescopes watch cosmic violence, mysteries unravel

The planet, called WASP-12b, is the hottest known world ever discovered, with an atmosphere roiling at 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, the institute stated. The planet is 40% more massive than Jupiter and completes an orbit every 1.1 days.

"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," stated 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.

The star-eating-planet is Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph second major observation brought to light in the past two weeks.

The Hubble's equipment spotted a huge star -- 90 times more massive than the Sun -- blasting across space at over than 250,000 miles an hour.


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