Planet commits suicide.

news.yahoo.com...

WASHINGTON – Astronomers have found what appears to be a gigantic suicidal planet.

The odd, fiery planet is so close to its star and so large that it is triggering tremendous plasma tides on the star. Those powerful tides are in turn warping the planet's zippy less-than-a-day orbit around its star.

The result: an ever-closer tango of death, with the planet eventually spiraling into the star.

It's a slow death. The planet WASP-18b has maybe a million years to live, said planet discoverer Coel Hellier, a professor of astrophysics at the Keele University in England. Hellier's report on the suicidal planet is in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

"It's causing its own destruction by creating these tides," Hellier said.

The star is called WASP-18 and the planet is WASP-18b because of the Wide Angle Search for Planets team that found them.

A planet 10 times the size of Jupiter is about to crash into a star, thats a sight to behold. Its too bad our planet is not 10 times that size, helps deal with our population and resource problems. But then we couldn't live on a planet with such gravity force. And because of that, we also be asteroid bait.

reply to post by deltaboy


Interesting story.

But I think the planet had cancer, and was directed by the state of Washington to ram itself into the sun, instead of costly treatments. . .

Yes Indeed, This IS Very Interesting, But There Saying "Committing Suicide" As If The Planet Were Alive, And Had A Mind Of Its Own. I'm A Little Thrown Off? Isn't It Not The Planets Fault Its Plummeting Towards Its Star? And Shouldn't The Moon Be At Fault For Creating The Tides?

The incredible scale of these events make them mind boggling. I mean, its plummeting to its death ONE MILLION YEARS from now. Pretty amazing stuff.

Makes me want to go back to school for astronomy. This stuff gets my blood pumping.

I was just about to make a post about this. Here's the story as reported by physorg.com.

Article

Interesting stuff I came across the following when searching one of my favorite science websites:

Kamikaze Planet

Astronomers have found a giant planet orbiting so close to its parent star that it's bound to spiral inward to its doom or else be ripped to shreds by the star's gravity. Either way, the planet called WASP-18b should provide astronomers with a mother lode of data about the delicate gravitational balancing act that affects all solar systems.

sciencenow.sciencemag.org...

Originally posted by mikerussellus

 

Interesting story.
But I think the planet had cancer, and was directed by the state of Washington to ram itself into the sun, instead of costly treatments. . .

Actually, it was even worse: the planet's population refused to be vaccinated against swine flu.

[edit on 26-8-2009 by DeepSea]

Tides? What kind of tides? I think it's a bluff. I believe that it is going to continue to get closer and closer and then zing out into another galaxy, creating the same exact environment and then shooting off again to another galaxy. I think it knows what it is doing.

Or, it will just get blown up? lulz.
Second line.

I saw this. It's scary to think that something like this could happen. What if it happened to Earth?