Discovery of planet in 'death spiral' shows the grim future awaiting Earth
Jasper HamillThursday 9 Jan 2020 4:10 pm
Illustration of the exoplanet WASP-12b orbiting perilously close to its star (Image: Nasa)
One day Planet Earth will be 'roasted' as the sun grows to a become a terrifyingly huge 'red giant'.
And now we've found a planet way out in deep space that's a lot further along the road to destruction than our own lovely homeworld.
Astronomers have discovered that an exoplanet (the name a world outside our solar system) is in a 'death spiral' that will see it plunge into the star it's orbiting.
We will share a similar fate WASP-12b, located 600 light-years away in the constellation Auriga, because our world will one day be eaten by our star.
The exoplanet is 'hot Jupiter', a gas giant like our very own Jupiter but closer to its own sun.
'Ever since the discovery of the first hot Jupiter in 1995 – a discovery that was recognized with this year's Nobel Prize in Physics – we have wondered how long such planets can survive,' said Joshua Winn, a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton and one of the authors of the paper.
'We were pretty sure they could not last forever. The strong gravitational interactions between the planet and the star should cause the planet to spiral inward and be destroyed, but nobody could predict how long this takes. It might be millions of years, it might be billions or trillions.
'Now that we have measured the rate, for at least one system – it's millions of years – we have a new clue about the behaviour of stars as fluid bodies.'
Luckily, Earth is not locked into a death spiral, but it will still meet a fiery doom when the sun swells into a red giant in about five billion years' time.
WASP-12b has a 'comparatively paltry' three million years until it's game over.
Let's hope our planet never, ever gets sucked into a black hole (Image: Nasa)
Scientists recently offered the world a new way of working out what would happen if Earth smashed into a black hole.
Spoiler: our lovely planet would get sucked in and obliterated, resulting in the death of every single living organism.
Simply put, a black hole is a massively dense object with such a strong gravitational pull that not even light can escape. They are often formed when a star dies.
Once you cross a hole's 'event horizon' there is basically no chance of getting away and beyond this threshold lurks the 'singularity' where a huge mass is crammed into an infinitely small space.
The 'Black Hole Collision Calculator' lets you work out what would happen if a cosmic colossus hit our planet.
A black hole at the centre of a galaxy called M87. This is the first-ever picture of one of the galactic beasts (Source: Getty Images North America)
We calculated what would happen if the biggest black hole ever discovered smashed into us – and the numbers aren't pretty.
The largest supermassive hole ever discovered is called TON 618 and is believed to has a mass equivalent to 66 billion suns.
This would mean its event horizon – the gaping maw of a hole and its point of no return – would stretch for well over 100 million miles.
If our planet smashed into it, the collision would unleash… wait for it… 32,204,195,564,497,649,676,480,000,000,000,000 megajoules of energy.
This is (our calculations suggest) the equivalent of more than 500 septillion Hiroshima nuclear bombs (500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).
The black hole would barely even register the collision, with its event horizon growing just 0.000000000000004%.
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Nasa previously revealed what would happen if the sun turned into a black hole (something that scientists do not believe is possible, before you start to panic).
'The Sun will never turn into a black hole because it is not massive enough to explode,' it wrote.
'Instead, the Sun will become a dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf.
'But if, hypothetically, the Sun suddenly became a black hole with the same mass as it has today, this would not affect the orbits of the planets, because its gravitational influence on the solar system would be the same.
'So, Earth would continue to revolve around the Sun without getting pulled in — although the lack of sunlight would be disastrous for life on Earth.'