The hot Jupiter WASP-­121 b: A planet heading towards its doom

We present here the discovery by the WASP-South survey, in close collaboration with the Euler and TRAPPIST telescopes, of WASP-121 b, a new remarkable short-period transiting hot Jupiter. WASP-121 b is a very inflated (1.86 Rjup) Jupiter-mass (1.18 Mjup) planet that transits every 1.27 days a bright active F6V star. A notable property of WASP-121b is that its orbital semi-major axis is only 15% larger than its Roche limit, which suggests that the planet might be close to tidal disruption. Furthermore, its large size and extreme irradiation (7.1 10^9 erg s^-1 cm^-2) make it an excellent target for atmospheric studies via secondary eclipse observations. Using the TRAPPIST robotic telescope, we indeed detect its thermal emission in the z’-band at better than ~4sigma, the measured occultation depth being 603+-130 ppm. This measurement is a first for a ground-based 60cm telescope. Finally, from a measurement of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect with the CORALIE spectrograph, we infer a sky-projected spin-orbit angle of 257.8+-6 deg. This result indicates a significant misalignment between the spin axis of the host star and the orbital plane of the planet, the planet being in a nearly polar orbit