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Monday, May 24, 2010

Science The End of Our Planet

Posted by Charles Mudede on Mon, May 24, 2010 at 8:32 AM

And this?

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured evidence of a Sun-like star "eating" a nearby planet.

Astronomers knew that stars were capable of swallowing planets in orbit around them, but this is the first time the event has been "seen" so clearly.

This too shall happen here. The sun, the source of the stargazing organic slime on the earth's surface, will expand, and expand, and expand, and swallow three planets in a row (the fourth might be spared). But it looks like this meal will be very slow.

The researchers say the planet, which is called Wasp-12b, may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured.

Notsogoodphotography

You know you are the new kind of human—a human that has been liberated from sacred time, and also deep time (geological time), and embraced the absolute master of time: cosmic time—when you can say (almost with a yawn) such amazing things as "only 10 million years."

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"Because ten billion years' time is so fragile, so ephemeral... it arouses such a bittersweet, almost heartbreaking fondness."

- Now and Then, Here and There

Posted by Lilting Missive on May 24, 2010 at 8:57 AM

It's only a maybe that Earth will get eaten when the sun goes red giant. There are models that indicate that the suns expansion may affect the orbit sufficiently to push us out to about where Mars is now, sparing it getting eaten, but not doing us a bit of good.
The bigger worry for life here is that the sun will continue to get hotter throughout it's normal life cycle, meaning that within about a billion years it will be too hot here to sustain surface water any more as there will be enough energy in the atmosphere to shoot water particles out to space at a high enough rate to dry the whole planet.

Posted by Sean on May 24, 2010 at 9:13 AM

Nothing like this particular stellar event will happen here. This planet, WASP 12B, is orbiting its sun (which is close in size to ours) every one of our days, practically skipping across the star's face, at 130 miles per second, making the planet at least as hot as four thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It's almost twice as big as Jupiter, superexpanded from all that heat, and the star is tearing it apart at that short distance. Its sun hasn't reached the end of its main sequence yet to become a red giant, when it will instantly engulf and probably absorb most of what remains of WASP 12B. Pretty much nothing about this strange, superhot, unstable gas giant is anything like our world.

Posted by Peter F on May 24, 2010 at 9:16 AM