Suicidal Planet

By SETH BORENSTEIN
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.

The planet circles a star that is in the constellation Phoenix and is about 325 light-years away from Earth, which means it is in our galactic neighborhood. A light-year is about 5.8 trillion miles.

The planet is 1.9 million miles from its star, 1/50th of the distance between Earth and the sun, our star. And because of that the temperature is about 3,800 degrees.

Its size — 10 times bigger than Jupiter — and its proximity to its star make it likely to die, Hellier said.

Think of how the distant moon pulls Earth’s oceans to form twice-daily tides. The effect the odd planet has on its star is thousands of times stronger, Hellier said. The star’s tidal bulge of plasma may extend hundreds of miles, he said.

Like most planets outside our solar system, this planet was not seen directly by a telescope.

Astronomers found it by seeing dips in light from the star every time the planet came between the star and Earth.

So far astronomers have found more than 370 planets outside the solar system. This one is “yet another weird one in the exoplanet menagerie,” said planet specialist Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

It’s so unusual to find a suicidal planet that University of Maryland astronomer Douglas Hamilton questioned whether there was another explanation. While it is likely that this is a suicidal planet, Hamilton said it is also possible that some basic physics calculations that all astronomers rely on could be dead wrong.

The answer will become apparent in less than a decade if the planet seems to be further in a death spiral, he said.

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Doesn’t WASP-18b have some brother or sister planet who could speak to him (her) and do some kind of intervention? Call a planetary therapist or something, tell him (her) life is alright and worth living.

So, WASP -18b is in our galactic neighbourhood. Sounds like its a good time to borrow some resources from our neighbour with the death wish. We could probably use some ozone, like a layer or two, and perhaps a few renewable resources, or even some non-renewable stuff like gas and oil. Maybe WASP-18b would be okay about hanging onto some of our stuff too, like garbage, plastic, nuclear waste, and WMD. (We should probably send a few racists along, you know, just to keep the stuff safe)

325 x 5.8 Trillion miles = 1,885,000,000,000,000 miles away. This is how small our galactic neighbourhood has become. It’s getting so crowded. The dysfunctional planets are taking over the place and wrecking the whole area. I should try move to another galactic neighbourhood. One that is safer and is more caring about its fellow planet.

And who names their planet WASP -18b anyways? No wonder this planet is all messed up. Probably lacking in self-esteem, hearing about how great WASP -18 is, so he (she) said “screw it I’m going to fly right into WASP-18 and end it all. That’ll show them.”

Astonomers must be deadly bored some days or perhaps they are feeling totally ignored. This story sounds like a cry for attention, if you ask me.