“Hey, they were hungry.” <strong>*</strong>

I’d rather be the lion than the wildebeest. Or the windshield than the bug. Or, in this case, the star than the unfortunately-placed planet:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Hubble space telescope has discovered a planet in our galaxy in the process of being devoured by the star that it orbits, according to a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The doomed planet, dubbed WASP-12b…

Racist.

…has the highest known surface temperature of any planet in the Milky Way — around 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,800 degrees Fahrenheit).

But it could be enveloped by its own parent star over the next ten million years, the paper’s authors have concluded.

And then it’ll be even hotter.

Using a new instrument called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph that was installed on Hubble in 2009, the researchers observed how the planet was whipped into an elongated shape by gravitational forces.

“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,” team leader Carole Haswell of The Open University in Great Britain said.

Discovered in 2008, WASP-12b…

Still racist. And sexist, too.

…is located about 600 light-years from Earth in the Auriga Constellation and is more than 300 times the size of Earth.

It also has a mass 40-percent greater than that of Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system.

By the way, I’m just kidding with those two pictures. This is the official “artist’s rendering:”

Caption:

That hottest known planet may be its shortest-lived …

This NASA artist’s concept image shows that the hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy may also be its shortest-lived world. The doomed planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The planet may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured.

In an interesting little google discovery, though, the first picture in this post came from this story in last year’s BBC:

Astronomers have calculated that there is a tiny chance that Mars or Venus could collide with Earth – though it would not happen for at least a billion years.

The prediction comes from simulations to show how orbits of planets might evolve billions of years into the future.

There’s a video report at the link, if you’re interested.

* Guess the movie!