Headline: Hubble catches planet being devoured by its star.

Wow! How cool…gotta click on this.

The Hubble space telescope has discovered a planet in our galaxy in the process of being devoured by the star that it orbits, according to a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The doomed planet, dubbed WASP-12b, has the highest known surface temperature of any planet in the Milky Way — around 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,800 degrees Fahrenheit).

But it could be enveloped by its own parent star over the next ten million years, the paper’s authors have concluded.

So… It hasn’t happened. And won’t for a ton of years. Because the “happening” is nothing more than a breathless sales hook by the nerd who wrote the story.

Yet the article has a dramatic picture — that is simply the artist’s conception of this nonexistent event. You know, this “happening” that was “caught by the Hubble.”

[Via the Ditch.]