Planet Found Orbiting Puffed-Up Star

[n2doc]

This artist's impression shows a red supergiant engulfing a Jupiter-like planet as it expands. The red giant HD 102272 will likely not engulf its planet for another 100 million years when it begins to mushroom dramatically. Credit: NASA

By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer
posted: 01 December 2008 08:20 am ET

A planet outside of the solar system has been discovered orbiting a dying, puffed-up star called a red giant.
The finding could help astronomers learn more about the fate of our solar system.

The newly discovered exoplanet is nearly six times the mass of Jupiter and orbits the red giant star HD 102272, which is located 1,200 light-years away in the constellation Leo. To date, about 20 red giants are known to support planets.
The researchers suspect another world is orbiting farther out in the system. If confirmed, the system would be the first red giant star known to support more than one planet.

Small and medium-sized stars like our sun become red giants when they exhaust all of their hydrogen fuel near the end of their lives. The stars' cores contract and begin to burn helium, while their outer shells balloon up to 100 times their original size. When our sun does that, Earth and other planets will be vaporized.

The finding, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, will shed light on how bloated stars interact with their resident planets.

The new planet orbits closer than any other world to its red giant parent, orbiting just 0.6 astronomical units (AU) from the star. The researchers suggest this distance could be the limit, with no planets venturing in closer to a red giant.
"When red-giant stars expand, they tend to eat up the nearby planets," said researcher Alexander Wolszczan, an astrophysicist at Penn State. "There appears to be a zone of avoidance around such stars of about 0.6 astronomical units."

more:
http://www.livescience.com/space/081201-mm-red-giant-planet.html

[derby378]

1. If HD 102272's companion is a gas planet like Jupiter...

...chances are the solar winds from HD 102272 will simply strip away the planet's atmosphere, layer by layer, with any shells of liquid hydrogen evaporating as the atmospheric pressure is reduced, until you have a possible rocky core in the center that will be all that's left of the doomed planet.

[Berry Cool]

2. Oh, drat, it's an outer space story.

I thought it was gonna be something about how Bill O'Reilly thinks the earth revolves around him.