Via Prison Planet.com » Sci Tech
London Telegraph
May 25, 2010
The Hubble space telescope has discovered a planet in our galaxy in the process of being devoured by the star that it orbits.
The doomed planet, dubbed WASP-12b, has the highest known surface temperature of any planet in the Milky Way – around 2,800F (1,500C).
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.
