The Doomed Planet Being Eaten Alive by Its Own Star: WASP-12b
Some planets are born into chaos. Others spend their final years revealing exactly how a planetary system works. WASP-twelve B is one of the strangest worlds ever studied. Orbiting its star from only a few million miles away, this enormous hot Jupiter completes an orbit in roughly twenty-six hours. But its year is getting shorter. Astronomers have measured the planet's orbital period changing by only a tiny fraction of a second each year. Over long periods, however, those small differences accumulate into something remarkable: evidence that the planet is gradually losing orbital energy as…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.