Tuesday, May 25, 2010

This is How the World Ends, This is How the World Ends

Not with a bang, but with a fiery sucking sound.


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.

All I can say is . . . wow.

2 comments:

junior said...

Call Al Gore - "global warming" running rampant.

I for one am going to review my "carbon footprint" so I can do my part to help out the inhabitants of planet WASP-12b. They must all be White Anglo-Saxon Protestant mutual fund managers.

Cuchieddie said...

Umm, has anyone heard that loud sucking sound coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave?