'Alien' planet detected circling dying star

[NuclearDem]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11775803

"Astronomers claim to have discovered the first planet originating from outside our galaxy.

The Jupiter-like planet, they say, is part of a solar system which once belonged to a dwarf galaxy.

This dwarf galaxy was in turn devoured by our own galaxy, the Milky Way, according to a team writing in the academic journal Science.

The star, called HIP 13044, is nearing the end of its life and is 2000 light years from Earth."

[Bolo Boffin]

1. There goes the neighborhood. n/t

[LongTomH]

2. More info and commentary on Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy website

..........including some fantastic artwork from the European Southern Observatory:



Exoplanet found.....from another Galaxy

Apparently, this planet spent some time orbiting inside its parent star!

That’s important because the planet found orbits the star extremely close in, only a few million kilometers from its surface. That means not only did this planet survive the red giant phase of its parent star, the star almost certainly engulfed the planet in the process.

That’s right: this planet from another galaxy also spent hundreds of thousands of years physically inside its star!

Holy wow! What a life this poor planet has had. It probably formed some distance out from its star. As it formed, it moved closer to its star as collisions with other objects and the drag it felt plowing through the disk of material from which it formed robbed it of orbital energy. Eventually, it settled into a nice, stable orbit. Then, a couple of billion years later, a huge spiral galaxy loomed in its sky. Over millions of years that galaxy drew larger, and larger, and larger, and then aiiieeeeee the planet’s host galaxy fell right into it, getting ripped apart, and forming a long, long stream of stars that flowed around the cannibal galaxy’s core.

If that weren’t enough, a few billion years later, the planet’s star began to swell. It filled a tenth of the sky, then a quarter, then half… and still it didn’t stop. The planet became engulfed, enveloped, as the star expanded past the planet itself. The outer regions of the star were exceedingly thin, almost a vacuum, but the effects were devastating. The atmosphere slowly started boiling off the planet, and the planet’s orbit spiraled it down toward the star’s core. Before the planet could be totally destroyed, the star ejected its outer layers, and the core settled down to fuse helium.

And, who was who said: "The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it's stranger than we can imagine!"

Great video from RussiaToday on YouTube.