Planet being devoured by yellow dwarf's heavenly inferno

Artist's conception of the explanet Wasp-12b being mangled by the heat of its parent star, after being caught in its gravitational pull. Illustration: G Bacon/STScI/Nasa/Esa

In a far-away region of the galaxy, a planet is learning the lesson that Icarus taught the ancient Greeks thousands of years ago.

A planet known as Wasp-12b is passing so close to its parent star that it is being roasted and ripped apart in an extraordinary display of celestial violence.

The gravitational pull of the star is so strong it has stretched the planet into the shape of a rugby ball. The planet has reached a temperature of more than 1,500C and material has begun spilling from it onto the star.

The planet's precarious situation was revealed by observations made with a new instrument on Nasa's Hubble space telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (Cos).

"We see a huge cloud of material around the planet which is escaping and will be captured by the star. We have identified chemical elements never before seen on planets outside our own solar system," said Carole Haswell, lead scientist at the Open University.

The planet may have only 10m years left before it is completely devoured, according to a report in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The star, a yellow dwarf called Wasp-12, is about 600 light years from Earth in the winter constellation of Auriga, the charioteer. The planet was spotted and named by the UK's Wide Area Search for Planets (Wasp) team in 2008.

The Wasp telescope looks for periodic dimming caused by planets moving across the faces of their parent stars. Wasp-12b is so close to its star, it completes an orbit in 1.1 days.

The Cos equipment monitors ultraviolet light coming from stars and was sensitive enough to show that the atmosphere of the planet had expanded greatly because it is so hot.