Literature Review for WASP-12b orbital decay

This article synthesizes past and recent articles which study WASP-12b, including its discovery, refined system parameters, and the mechanisms behind its orbital decay. This study mainly focuses on the orbital decay, whereas the orbit of WASP-12b is not persistent. A compilation of more than 15 years of literature on WASP-12b is utilized to extract its orbital data, revealing that its orbital period is diminishing at a rate of 32.53 milliseconds per year. The mechanism behind the decay can be traced to the tidal dissipation effects, where the planet's tidal interaction with its parent star leads to a gradual contraction of the orbit.