The planet being eaten alive by its own star: WASP-12b

Did you know there’s a planet doomed to disappear? WASP-12b orbits so close to its star that it completes a full orbit in just 1.1 Earth days (Mercury takes 88). It’s so close — only 2.1 million km away — that the star’s gravity has deformed it and is stripping away its material bit by bit. So much so, that a debris disk made of the planet’s own remains has formed around the star.

Astrophysicists at Princeton measured that its orbit is shrinking every year, and calculated how much time it has left: just 3 million years before it’s fully consumed. In astronomical terms, that’s almost nothing.

It’s literally a world dying in real time, right in front of our telescopes, slowly devoured by its own star.

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