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 1500 degrees Celsius.

A NASA artist's image of how the doomed planet is being eaten by its parent star.

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

Using a new instrument called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph that was installed on Hubble in 2009, the researchers observed how the planet was whipped into an elongated shape by gravitational forces.