OU research has for the first time identified a star swallowing a planet.

Astronomers had known this was a theoretical possibility when a planet and a star get too close, but it had never been seen before.

The doomed planet, WASP-12b, was discovered in 2008 by the UK SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) consortium. The OU is one of seven main institutions that make up SuperWASP, a world-leading consortium for detecting planets which lie outside our own solar system.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, a team led by Carole Haswell (DPS) studied WASP-12b, which has the highest known surface temperature of any planet in our entire galaxy. They discovered that huge clouds of the planet’s material are being captured by its parent star, which they believe could destroy the planet entirely within ten million years.

SuperWASP