Ufomammut and the “Ever-Closer Tango of Death”
I know this Associated Press story has literally nothing to do with stoner rock, doom, drone, psych or anything else covered on this site, but man, the thought of a planet 10 times the size of Jupiter falling into its star and being so huge as to gravitationally create tides of fire is some of the coolest shit I’ve seen all week. Certainly beats all the hemming and hawing over that guy who killed Mary Jo Kopechne. In order to make it semi-relevant, I decided to include some listening music from Ufomammut, because when I think of planets crashing into the sun, theirs is the first sound that comes to mind. Please click play above before you read:
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.
Tags: Space, Ufomammut
