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A “hot Jupiter's” dark side is revealed in detail for first time
- dotancohen 5y agoWhy would a gaseous planet be tidally locked? Obviously a non-homogeneous solid object would settle with it's denser end "downward" toward the star, but I don't see how a gaseous planet would do so.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoThis is a study of an exoplanet. Apparently, a "hot Jupiter" is shorthand for a general classification of planet type. The planet at the center of the new study, which appears today in Nature Astronomy, is WASP-121b, a massive gas giant nearly twice the size of Jupiter. The planet is an ultrahot Jupiter and was discovered in 2015 orbiting a star about 850 light years from Earth.
- tejtm 5y agoYes a large gas giant but right in close to the star. There is a bias for finding them since they orbit rapidly (like our planet Mercury) but block much more light and we do good with noticing blinky lights
- cgriswald 5y agoThe comparison to Mercury's orbit is mildly inapt. A hot Jupiter is much closer to its host star than Mercury and subsequently orbits in a matter of a handful of days rather than Mercury's ~3 months.
- dhosek 5y agoThere was a diagram of the solar system recently shared (like in the last few months) that really threw of my image of how close Mercury is to the Sun, especially relative to the Sun's size. Thanks to badly scaled diagrams, I'd always envisioned Mercury's distance to the Sun as being less than 2 solar radii (so a daytime sky would be pretty much all Sun). It's always a little surprising to realize just how much space there is in space.
- Vanit 5y agoSimilarly, to scale depictions of the distance/size of the Earth and the moon were quite surprising to me too.
- aaronblohowiak 5y agoI feel like this was an appropriate example of Wittgenstein’s ladder
- jackallis 5y agoiron cloud and titanium rain - can't wrap me head around that.
- bradbot 5y agoThat's what got me too! At first I was picturing a solid piece of iron, floating in the sky, but I'm assuming it's more like a cloud here on earth, except formed by iron vapor instead of water vapor.
- anthropodie 5y agoIron vapour, Titanium in liquid state. The amount of Energy required for that kind of state of matter would be huge. If only we could harness it somehow.
- zardo 5y agoLike a sunlit fog at just the right angle to be blinding white. Only, it's midnight and that's a cloud of white hot liquid metal.
- milliams 5y ago> 10 times fainter What does that mean?