Discovery of planet in ‘death spiral’ shows the grim future awaiting Earth

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...