“It’s named the CRAP mechanism. I don’t know who came up with the term, but that’s what it is called.” —Astronomer Jean-Philippe Berger of the European Southern Observatory discusses the CRAP mechanism, in which a star basically farts out its mass on another star. Science, you are so awesome!

The latest exciting space drama to come via the Hubble Telescope takes place 600 light years from earth in a constellation called Auriga. There, a huge planet called Wasp 12b is being eaten by its sun, the dwarf star Wasp 12. (The entities are so named not just because "wasp" is a such an awesome word, but for the British project, the Wide Area Search for Planets, through which they were discovered in 2008.) Apparently, the helpless planet is being drawn into tighter and tighter orbit.

Let me tell ya, sonny, they don't make stars like CW Leonis anymore. You think the sun is a big deal? The sun is nothing! This guy is twice the size-with a radius 250 times bigger! So in his twilight years, 500 light years from Earth, it's only right that he gets to enjoy one of life's true pleasures: a "steam bath." I heard from Herschel.

"The burst was so bright when it first erupted that our data-analysis software shut down. So many photons were bombarding the detector each second that it just couldn't count them quickly enough. It was like trying to use a rain gauge and a bucket to measure the flow rate of a tsunami … When I first saw the strange data from this burst, I knew that I had discovered something extraordinary. It was an indescribable feeling when I realized, at that moment, that I was the only person in the whole universe who knew that this extraordinary event had occurred." -Phil Evans, a postdoctoral research assistant at the [...]