Astronomers have discovered a new ocean world outside the solar system that orbits extremely close to its parent star. This means that the extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," is in hot water, both literally and figuratively.

The exoplanet orbits the star HD 176071 located around 335 light-years away, and is about two and a half times the size of Earth, but has about eight and a half times the mass of our planet. That indicates to scientists that this planet is about 50% water. At a distance from its star of just under 1.5 million miles (about 1.6% of the distance between the Earth and the sun) and with a year lasting just 14 hours, HD 176071 b is a rare example of a "hot water world."

That close distance to its star means the planet experiences extreme tidal forces due to the pull of the star's gravity. These forces are driving the planet, designated HD 176071 b, towards a rapid and inexorable fatal encounter that will see it eventually violently devoured by its host star.

The exoplanet is also a rare occupant of what scientists call "Neptunian Desert" a term which describes a lack of Neptune sized worlds orbiting very close to their host stars. This is thought to be because intense stellar radiation strips planets of their gaseous layers effectively shrinking them. However, HD 176071 b seems to defy this suggestion, as this water world possesses surprisingly a dynamic atmosphere that hasn't been stripped away.

"Comparing historical data from the Kepler space telescope with new TESS (Transisting Exoplante Survey Satellite) observations six years later, we noticed an unexpected phase shift in the modulation of the reflected light," lead researcher Sylvain N. Breton of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) said in a statement.

"This tells us that we are not looking at a static photograph, but a living and changing atmosphere, in which dense, highly reflective clouds form, evolve, and move along the planet's coldest edges."

That isn't the only extraordinary thing about HD 176071 b. The way the ocean exoplanet was initially discovered is pretty special too.

This ocean world doesn't cross its stellar parent

Currently NASA's catalog of confirmed exoplanets has over 6,000 entries with thousands more worlds beyond the solar system awaiting conformation. The vast majority of these were discovered when they passed in from of their host star and caused a tiny dip in starlight reaching us from that stellar body in what's known as the transit method of exoplanet detection.

Thus, the transit method requires the planet to pass between its star and Earth. As you may imagine, that's a really fortunate arrangement for astronomers to find new planets in. Most known planets in the Milky Way don't do that.

"The vast majority of planets in the universe never transit in front of their star from Earth's perspective, making them virtually invisible," Breton said.

HD 176071 b is just such a world, with this geometric hinderance, so Breton and colleagues had to be crafty to discover this water world.

The team still used the starlight of the parent star of HD 176071 b to detect the exoplanet, but instead hunted for tiny fluctuations in brightness caused when the light from this star was reflected from the planet. HD 176071 b is tidally locked, meaning it has a permanent "dayside" facing its star, and a perpetual "nightside" facing out to space. The variations in brightness result because sometimes the nightside of the planet faces us, and other times our instruments see its dayside.

"Thanks to the dataset acquired with the HARPS-N instrument on the Galileo National Telescope, we have managed to overcome this geometric obstacle: by measuring with extreme precision how the light reflected by the planet varies throughout its orbital journey, we can not only detect these elusive worlds, but also begin to characterize their structure and atmosphere, opening a fundamental window onto previously almost inaccessible planetary populations," Breton said.

The discovery of HD 176071 b shows that current astronomy techniques are sophisticated enough to characterize the atmosphere and internal structure of worlds beyond the solar system. That is a big boost for the detection of worlds that don't pass between Earth and their host star.

The team's research was published on Tuesday (August 25) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Sometimes, to accomplish your mission, you have to start a few fires.

What is it?

At the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (VKI) in Belgium, researchers put a heat shield to the test, blasting it with scorching-hot flames to see how it would handle the intense temperatures it would experience when reentering Earth's atmosphere.

The heat shield is for Draco, a European Space Agency mission that is literally designed to go up in flames. Draco stands for the Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object. The mission will send a satellite to space and back to collect data on the scorching experience of reentering Earth's atmosphere.

"Our biggest design challenge lies in meeting two contrasting requirements: having Draco disintegrate normally during reentry just like any average satellite, yet also recording the event and storing its data in a capsule that stays intact throughout, until the data can be transmitted safely," Draco project manager Stijn Lemmens said in a statement.

Why is it incredible?

For decades, we have sent satellites, telescopes, landers, rovers and even humans to space. And we know that the missions that return to Earth are in for a rough ride home.

When reentering through Earth's atmosphere, a spacecraft will experience extreme temperatures. And while some are designed to withstand the heat, others are meant to burn up.

But there has yet to be a spacecraft whose purpose is to be destroyed by Earth's atmosphere so we can study it. That's where Draco comes in. The mission will collect valuable data to help us better understand exactly how satellites burn up in our atmosphere.

While sending a satellite into orbit around Earth was once a novelty, today there are so many objects in orbit that companies are working to ensure that their probes can successfully burn up in our atmosphere so that they do not become dangerous space junk, orbiting until they collide with another object.

With Draco, researchers hope to better understand the process so that, when we want to send a satellite to its doom, we know what to expect.

With just a few days left before China's Tiangong-1 space station is expected to come crashing down on Earth, astronomers captured this incredible view of the derelict craft zooming through space.

The Virtual Telescope Project in Italy, together with the Tenagra Observatory in Arizona, used a robotically controlled telescope to provide live views of the space station during a webcast this morning (March 28). In this view from the webcast, Tiangong-1 is gleaming as the sun reflects off the spacecraft's surface and faint star trails streak across the background.

Capturing the out-of-control space station "was an extremely difficult task" due to the craft's speed, Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project said in a statement. Tiangong-1 was moving at about 18 degrees per minute (for comparison, your clenched fist held at arm's length is about 10 degrees wide). According to the satellite-tracking website satview.org, the station's speed was approximately 17,400 mph (28,000 km/h). [China's Space Station Crash: Everything You Need to Know]

"Our telescope honestly did out-of-this world work to track such a target," Masi told Space.com in an email. Tracking an object that swift "is something which very few observatories can do," Masi said, but the telescopes available at the Virtual Telescope Project and Tenagra Observatory were equipped for the challenge. The Paramount ME robotic mount installed on these telescopes is "the best hardware of this kind available in the world," the Virtual Telescope Project's website states.

At the time the image was captured, Tiangong-1 was orbiting at an altitude of about 137 miles (220 kilometers). That's around half as high as the International Space Station, which flies at an average altitude of 248 miles (400 km) above the Earth.

Tiangong-1's orbit is slowly decaying, and the station is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere sometime between March 31 and April 1, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). While most of the station will burn up in the atmosphere, some of its hardier components will likely survive the inferno and crash into Earth, experts predict. But there's no need to hunker down all weekend; ESA officials estimate that the odds of being stuck by a piece of Tiangong-1 are less than 1 in 300 trillion, and the station will most likely fall in the ocean.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com, or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

As Tiangong-1 makes its last few orbits of Earth before burning up in the atmosphere in a few days, you can watch the Chinese space station live online through a robotically controlled telescope at The Virtual Telescope Project.

Live coverage of the event will start Wednesday (March 28) at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), but the organizers said the timing could change closer to the event. You can visit this page on The Virtual Telescope Project's website to see updates.

"The Tiangong-1 Chinese space station is re-entering our atmosphere soon," representatives for The Virtual Telescope Project wrote in a statement. "The Virtual Telescope Project and Tenagra Observatories offer you the unique chance to see it during one of its very last passages across the skies. You can join us online, via the internet, from the comfort of your home." [China's Space Station Crash: Everything You Need to Know]  

Tiangong-1 is the first Chinese space station; it launched in 2011 and hosted two crews of Chinese astronauts, in 2012 and 2013. It remained operational until 2016, when contact with the space station was lost. The station is now falling toward Earth and is expected to burn up in the atmosphere over Easter weekend (March 30 to April 2).

It's unclear how much of Tiangong-1 will survive the journey, but it's possible some pieces will fall to the ground. The station has an orbital inclination between 43 degrees north and 43 degrees south latitudes, so it could fall anywhere within those bands. But experts point out that Tiangong-1 is much smaller than the NASA Skylab space station, parts of which crashed into remote areas of Australia in 1979, so most of it may burn up during re-entry. Tiangong-1 weighs only 8.5 metric tons (9.4 tons), compared to Skylab's 100 tons.

The Virtual Telescope Project is managed by astronomer Gianluca Masi and includes several robotic telescopes that can be accessed in real time online. The project also hosts periodic public online observing events, which include live commentary.

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When a small asteroid fell to Earth over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, the speeding space rock exploded midair and created a shock wave powerful enough to damage thousands of buildings and injure more than 1,200 people. The blast from the Chelyabinsk explosion shattered glass windows up to 58 miles (93 kilometers) away.

Just in time for Asteroid Day (June 30), NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office has released a supercomputer simulation of a Chelyabinsk-like asteroid burning up in Earth's atmosphere. Simulations such as this one "help first responders and other agencies to identify and make better informed decisions for how best to defend against life-threatening asteroid events," NASA officials said in a statement.

Using the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Facility in California's Silicon Valley, researchers are modeling hypothetical asteroid-impact scenarios like this one to learn more about how dangerous space rocks crumble into pieces after entering Earth's atmosphere. These supercomputer simulations harness NASA's Cart3D aerodynamic design software and the ALE3D modeling software developed by Lawrence Livermore National Lab. [Gallery: Chelyabinsk Explosion of 2013]

"The NASA team was able to run large-scale simulations of the Chelyabinsk asteroid event on Pleiades to produce many impact scenarios quickly, because Cart3D is dozens of times faster than typical 3-D numerical modeling used for aerodynamic analysis," NASA officials said in the statement. "The detailed simulations allowed the team to model the fluid flow that occurs when asteroids melt and vaporize as they break up in the atmosphere."

Experts with the Asteroid Threat Assessment Project at NASA's Ames Research Facility share this research with universities, national labs and government agencies around the world to help people come up with plans for dealing with the threat of asteroid impacts.

Learn more about the Chelyabinsk event from the Science@NASA video series: 

Editor's Note: Space.com senior producer Steve Spaleta contributed to this report.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.