The fiery planet is so huge and so close to its sun that it is causing enormous plasma tides on the star, which in turn cause “wobbling” in its rapid orbit (less than a day in Earth time). Astronomers predict that the strange planet will eventually plummet into the star – after about a million years.

"It's causing its own destruction by creating these tides," said Coel Hellier, an astrophysics professor at Keele University in England, who discovered the planet.

The planet, called WASP-18b, is nearly 2 million miles from its star – just 2 percent of the distance between Earth and our sun. Because of this, the surface temperature of the planet, which is 10 times the size of Jupiter, is a hellish 3,800 degrees.

The giant planet is among some 370 recently discovered planets outside our Solar System. These “exo-planets” have not been seen directly through telescopes, but have been inferred by detecting the changes in light emitted from their stars as they pass between the star and the view from Earth.