A Planet is being Vapourized by its Home Star
At least once a month we hear of a new exoplanet with a strange and amazing story. From the ‘Super-Saturn’ ringed world to Magnetic Fields to systems of three Earths, there is an abundance of planets and strange systems. The latest weird discovery brings us to a star 1,500 light years away in the constellation Cygnus. The small-Mercury sized planet it hosts orbits in only 16 hours, bringing its surface temperature to over 1,800 degrees celsius. This amount of heat is enough to vapourize rock, and so the star is literally roasting the planet and blasting away its surface. The dust...