Star Devours Planet

The hottest-known planet in our galaxy is being stretched into the shape of a football and rapidly consumed by its parent star, new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show.

The extrasolar planet on the cosmic menu, called WASP-12b, may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured, Hubble scientists announced Thursday.

WASP-12b is so close to its sun-like star that it is superheated to nearly 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit and stretched into an elongated shape by enormous tidal forces.

Because of those phenomenal forces, the planet's atmosphere has ballooned to nearly three times Jupiter's radius and is pouring material onto its parent star. WASP-12b is 40 percent more massive than Jupiter.

This effect of matter exchange between two stellar objects is commonly seen in close binary star systems, but this is the first time it has been seen so clearly for a planet. The system was observed with the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) instrument on Hubble.

"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," said team leader Carole Haswell of The Open University in the United Kingdom.

The distortion of the planet by the star's gravity was first predicted in a paper published in February in the journal Nature by Shu-lin Li of Peking University in Beijing. That work predicted that the gravitational tidal forces working on the planet would make its interior so hot that it greatly expands the planet's outer atmosphere.

Now Hubble has confirmed this prediction.

Can you imagine what seeing this from the bridge of a Starship would be like?

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Today I'm with my friend, fellow journalist and bestselling RRP author of Love's Chance, Angela Kaye Austin. She asked me a few questions on how I go about researching and then writing my SFR stories. So I have given her a few of my views. This article -- about Science Fiction and Science Fiction Romance -- is up on Romancing the Pen. Just click on over and take a look!


Links:
Romancing the Pen ~HERE~
FORBIDDEN LOVE ~HERE~
My SFR Website ~HERE~

See you around the Galaxy!

Kaye Manro

Counting Stars

Every once in awhile during a story, my characters stop and count the stars. It's a way to keep from taking the backdrop of space for granted. Think of your last road trip. Did it really pass in a blur? Or was there something, no matter how tiny, that made you catch in your breath for a second? When I need something for a space-faring hero to show a heroine or other way around, I go to Hubble Telescope site, and to the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day. The Astronomy Picture of the Day isn't strictly photos of celestial phenomena as evidenced by a spectacular shot of lightning generated from volcanic ash clouds. In that photo, you're seeing something that science cannot fully explain, yet. Theory has it that static builds up in the dust, gas and heat, thereby generating the lightning, but research to verify the hypothesis is ongoing. Where am I headed with this? What's out there between the stars? Dust and gas. Suppose your spaceship passes near a dense, dark nebula that's thick with dust. A nearby star has been exhibiting an upswing in radiation emissions, exciting that dust and gas. If lightning doesn't require oxygen in order to fire, a hero and/or heroine could catch a deep space lightning storm. Or perhaps a spaceship cuts through a patch of dust and the static generated by the dust passing over the hull leads to new adventure? Do they glow and give away their position? Does the static blow their electrical grid? Or short their onboard computers? How many ways do you want your characters to survive by the skin of their teeth just after they've paused to count the stars?