Cannibal star is devouring a planet, astronomers say

Like the Roman god Saturn who ate his own children, a star 600 light years from Earth is slowly gobbling up one of its own planets, according to a study released on Wednesday in Nature, the British science journal.

The planet, whose discovery was reported last year, is a "gas giant" with a mass about 40 percent greater than that of Jupiter, the biggest planet of our Solar System, and with a radius 79 percent bigger.

But whereas Jupiter takes nearly 12 years to plod around the Sun, it takes WASP-12b a mere 26 hours to race around its star, WASP-12, located in the constellation of Auriga.

So close is its orbit that the gravitational tug of the star has helped to squeeze the planet into a prolate shape, meaning that it has taken the form of a rugby ball, or American football.

Searing heat is stripping away layers of the gas, whose mass is then captured by the star.

The disk of captured matter around the star may mask "a detectable resonant super-Earth," whose presence may cause WASP-12b to orbit in a remarkably egg-shaped path, suggests the study.

Most planets that orbit close to their sun have a more circular track.

That is simply incredible. A star feeding on a nearby planet. I bet there is alot of beautiful aurora on that planet. It seems to me that the more we look and find these hot jupiters the more irregular our solar system seems.

I can't wait for the next generation of planet finders like the Kepler Observatory to come online. The prospect of finding extra-solar earth like planets is one of the most exciting apects of space science today in my opinion.

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