Somewhere in the constellation Auriga, a world is ending. Fortunately, WASP-12b is an inhospitable planet, so all casualties will be limited to gaseous explosions of apocalyptic proportion. Despite possessing twice the waistline of Jupiter and half again its heft, this giant exoplanet lives so close to its star that it whizzes around once each (Earth) day. It also appears darker than fresh asphalt, trapping almost all of the light that falls on it as heat.
Being this hot, swift, and dark comes with a downside: Under such conditions, the atmosphere burns so intensely that it can’t quite keep itself together. “The planet is so hot that the outermost layers are pumped up,” says Samuel Yee, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. Eventually parts of the planet’s atmosphere expand so far from its core that they fall into its hungry host star. In 2010, researchers gave the planet just ten million years left to live.
But according to new research, WASP-12b may not even have that long. As it wastes away to nothing, a separate gravitational effect also drags the world toward its star, which will rip the planet apart in perhaps 3 million years, Yee and his colleagues argue in their latest paper. Astronomers have long suspected that such planets, appropriately known as “hot Jupiters,” should be especially prone to this fate, but WASP-12b’s death spiral is the first to confirm it.
Researchers discovered WASP-12b in 2008, as its passage in front of its star dimmed the host’s light, causing a daily flicker. Follow-up observations also revealed that the planet’s heat makes it glow, letting astronomers tell when it disappeared behind the star as well.
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