Hot young blonde eaten up by star system

May 24, 2010 3:46 PM

Hubble spots a planet-eating star. The list of confirmed extrasolar planets numbers only 455; the first ones being discovered in 1990. That count is about to decrease.

(In about 10 million years, that is.)

WASP-12b is the hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, and it may also be the shortest-lived. The 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).

posted by Hardcore Poser (47 comments total)

Goodnight WASP-12b.

.
posted by R. Mutt at 3:49 PM on May 24, 2010

Needs the "omnomnom" tag.
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:49 PM on May 24, 2010 [6 favorites]

So, from the linked article, the star is called Wasp-12. May I be the first in this thread to suggest renaming the star Galactus.

Interesting article, thanks for the post!
posted by marxchivist at 3:52 PM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

"extrasolar planets" link is bad.
posted by roll truck roll at 3:55 PM on May 24, 2010

.
posted by lazaruslong at 3:58 PM on May 24, 2010

Wow! That's really interesting. *loves astrophysics*

As for Earth-like planets, I'm sure we're not even close to discovering a fraction of what's out there. Statistically speaking, there must be life SOMEWHERE.
posted by MaiaMadness at 4:03 PM on May 24, 2010

Statistically speaking, there must be life SOMEWHERE.

Yeah, but given the size and age of the Universe, the odds of finding it would seem to be quite small.

I wouldn't necessarily bet against eventually finding traces of extinct life, though.
posted by Kadin2048 at 4:10 PM on May 24, 2010

Welp, time to build another giant step pyramid and fire up the human heart sacrifices again. Wouldn't want Sol getting any hungrier.
posted by Countess Elena at 4:32 PM on May 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

Kadin2048: Yeah, but given the size and age of the Universe, the odds of finding it would seem to be quite small.

I don't know about that. The Earth developed life pretty much as soon as it could. That it didn't sit around for a long time first suggests that the odds for developing life, given proper conditions, are pretty good. Plus, it may be easy to detect - the large quantities of free oxygen in Earth's atmosphere should be pretty easy to see with a spectroscope, and it's an unstable condition that couldn't persist in the absence of life.

Intelligent life, on the other hand, is probably vastly more rarer and short-lived. It might be much more difficult to detect.
posted by Mitrovarr at 4:34 PM on May 24, 2010

roll truck roll: ""extrasolar planets" link is bad."

Not sure how that happened. Here it is.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 4:34 PM on May 24, 2010

Try to think of it as the children going home for a family reunion, not that they are the main course.
posted by Cranberry at 4:41 PM on May 24, 2010

My last name is spelled "Hubbell" (pronounced the same as "Hubble") and, every time I hear about something awesome that the telescope has found, I pretend that it's me that did it.

So, yes. That's right. I found Galactus.

You're welcome.
posted by brundlefly at 4:41 PM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

MaiaMadness: "As for Earth-like planets, I'm sure we're not even close to discovering a fraction of what's out there. "

If you check out the chart of extrasolar planet discoveries by year, it looks very much like exponential growth. And that's with only eight methods of discovery; as the science (and tech) progresses the discovery rate could increase.

No comment on the possibilities of life; I've had my mind changed on that one too many times to know what to think.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 4:45 PM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

Artist's rendition.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:52 PM on May 24, 2010 [4 favorites]

Are we sure it is merely a star and not a giant floating carrot with a star in the middle of it that menaced the worlds of TO Star Trek before that mentally imbalanced guy flew the shuttle into it?
posted by angrycat at 4:52 PM on May 24, 2010

Everybody is a star. One big circle moving round and round.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:53 PM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

From article:

Although the planet was too far away for Hubble to photograph, scientists have created an image of it, based on analysis of the telescope's data.

In short, pandering to the theater.
posted by JHarris at 5:00 PM on May 24, 2010

(Okay, maybe that was a little too harsh, but when I saw that picture on the article, with the NASA credit, I though, how on earth do they have pictures with such clarity? And why does it look like something from The Core? Disappointment makes one grumpy.)
posted by JHarris at 5:02 PM on May 24, 2010

From the abstract of the metals paper: We detect enhanced transit depths at the wavelengths of resonance lines of neutral sodium, tin, and manganese, and at singly ionized ytterbium, scandium, manganese, aluminum, vanadium, and magnesium. We also find the statistically expected number of anomalous transit depths at wavelengths not associated with any known resonance line.

I want to name my children ytterbium and vanadium. Or maybe just my cat.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 5:09 PM on May 24, 2010

Better artists's rendition.
posted by GuyZero at 5:12 PM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

Sure, that's cool, but I want to see a star barfing up a planet that didn't agree with it.
posted by bwg at 5:13 PM on May 24, 2010

I wonder how many calories there are in a planet.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 5:16 PM on May 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

bwg: An interesting question. Would a gas giant or ice giant have enough mass to trigger a nova?
posted by KirkJobSluder at 5:21 PM on May 24, 2010

Planets contains very few calories, kuujjuarapik, as they are comprised primarily of minerals which will pass straight through your digestive system without being absorbed. Slowly eating, say, Mars would therefore be a reasonable diet plan, as it would give you a "full" feeling without adding any bulk. Eating too much of a planet at one sitting can cause a feeling of bloating, however.
posted by kyrademon at 5:27 PM on May 24, 2010 [3 favorites]

Neat accompaniment to the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man. It's like a galactic version. Now you have your power pellet Wasp-12, you go get those monsters.
posted by unliteral at 5:32 PM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

I think it's a very lucky and narrow band that makes "Earth-like" planets possible, where not all water is either frozen or boiled off, but I'm no scientist, I just read a lot of comic books.
posted by Ron Thanagar at 5:58 PM on May 24, 2010

It's not polite to stare when a star is eating.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:59 PM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ah. I initially parsed this as "a planet eating a star", which was a new one for me.
posted by niles at 6:04 PM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

WASP-12b is the hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, and it may also be the shortest-lived.

Thank you, "science" reporting that loves to be poetic/humorous at the expense of facts. If the star is sun-like won't the planets be roughly the age of the ones in the solar system? And if not, is there any data on how long-lived the planet is?
posted by DU at 6:11 PM on May 24, 2010

I made you a planet, but I eated it.
posted by Avelwood at 6:35 PM on May 24, 2010 [2 favorites]

It has a few million years left which is a bit longer than My 401k will last; what with the situation on Wall Street and my love of extravagant travel and all.
posted by humanfont at 6:56 PM on May 24, 2010

I wouldn't necessarily bet against eventually finding traces of extinct life, though.

Perhaps I'm alone in this, but I always thought that the search for life was the search for exactly this, the evidence that life once existed. This is the first, difficult hurdle. We do not really know that the existence of extrasolar planets means there can be life outside our solar system. We don't even really know for certain that the existence of liquid water means life can exist.

If you consider how little of the lifetime of this planet has had life on it, and how little that time has had intelligent life, it's quite clear that we won't be talking to the aliens we meet any time soon. It is my sincere wish that we find evidence of dead life sometime in my lifetime. Realistically I cannot hope for anything more.

Besides, considering how vast the galaxy is, even if we do find intelligent life communicating with us, by the time their signals reach our planet there is a pretty good chance something happened that caused them to become extinct. And forget about communicating with other galaxies. By the time we get the messages from them most like their planets were eaten by Galactus, here.

To get away from the philosophical and back to the practical, I'm a little disappointed this post did not have a link to anything Kepler has done. Kepler is a space telescope designed to find exoplanets. Yes it's early on in it's mission, but as I recall Hubble didn't really find anything amazing in the first few years of it's mission. Give Kepler a few years to have it's software refined and I think it's going to blow us all away.

Don't get me wrong, I love Hubble, and I think the telescope has done more for our understanding of the universe than many scientists on this planet. I consider it an honorary human. It certainly has changed my life. But I think now Hubble is just a media buzz-word that people can use to get regular people to pay attention to science. There is a positive aspect to that, but I don't feel it's being used correctly.

I made you a planet, but I eated it.

While writing this post I felt I was being too brainy smurf. After reading the post that I was following, I'm not sure for which of us I should be embarrassed.
posted by chemoboy at 7:14 PM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

I wouldn't necessarily bet against eventually finding traces of extinct life, though.

Ancient traces of a long-dead galactic race. Sounds like that long-forgotten spin-off series to Babylon 5.
posted by ovvl at 7:25 PM on May 24, 2010

KirkJobSluder: I want to name my children ytterbium and vanadium. Or maybe just my cat.

Why would you want to name a child "My Cat"?
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:26 PM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

A few older planet-swallowers.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 8:55 PM on May 24, 2010

Ancient traces of a long-dead galactic race. Sounds like that long-forgotten spin-off series to Babylon 5.

And a bunch of other shows.
posted by dd42 at 9:11 PM on May 24, 2010

Jack Kirby would flip the FUCK out.
posted by shmegegge at 9:18 PM on May 24, 2010

WASP-12b is the hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, and it may also be the shortest-lived.

Thank you, "science" reporting that loves to be poetic/humorous at the expense of facts. If the star is sun-like won't the planets be roughly the age of the ones in the solar system?

Perhaps it's just late and my brain isn't functioning right, but...

If there are two objects, both of the same age (as our planet, for example, and WASP-12b seem to be), and one of them is eaten by a sun, while the other isn't, wouldn't it make sense to call the former "shorter-lived?" Given that we haven't seen any other planets (older or younger) being eaten or otherwise being destroyed before their time, it does seem therefore to make sense to call WASP-12b the shortest-lived among "known" planets.
posted by AdamCSnider at 9:39 PM on May 24, 2010

Statistically speaking, there must be life SOMEWHERE.

If you were speaking statistically, wouldn't there be odds involved?
posted by mrgrimm at 11:16 PM on May 24, 2010

Hardcore Poser: No comment on the possibilities of life; I've had my mind changed on that one too many times to know what to think.

I've always been an optimist on this issue. I want there to be intelligent life in the universe so badly no one will ever change my mind. :) Maybe it's all the sci-fi...
posted by MaiaMadness at 3:37 AM on May 25, 2010

Statistically speaking, there must be life SOMEWHERE.

Yeah, here. At this stage everything else is just conjecture at this stage.
posted by Dysk at 6:08 AM on May 25, 2010

I always get excited when they make things seem so eminent. Then they drop this on me:

may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured.

ONLY 10 million years left.
posted by SneakyArab at 8:17 AM on May 25, 2010

Statistically speaking, there must be life SOMEWHERE.

Yeah, here. At this stage everything else is just conjecture at this stage.

But surely you'll agree that elsewhere in the universe there must be conjecture about there being life elsewhere in the universe, surely you'll agree.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:15 AM on May 25, 2010

>Eating too much of a planet at one sitting can cause a feeling of bloating, however.

Moreso if the planet is a *gas giant* . . .
posted by flug at 11:04 AM on May 25, 2010

Planets contains very few calories

What about all of the methane in Uranus? *snigger* Methane is something like 55.5401 kJ/g, and that works out to about 13274.4 calories per gram or 13 dietary calories per gram. And there are tons of methane on Uranus.

Maybe methane counts as an Atkins food?
posted by kuujjuarapik at 2:16 PM on May 25, 2010

The activity has acquired a name.


Um...and that picture is one of some other Kronos....
posted by Kronos_to_Earth at 7:39 PM on May 25, 2010

Planetary Bullies Make Astronomers Rethink the Habitable Zone
posted by homunculus at 11:00 AM on May 26, 2010