4 ms·
How do you get an object of 44 Earth masses with the average density of styrofoam? The obvious starting point I guess is a core of very light elements, and a r
by abecedarius 2y ago
How do you get an object of 44 Earth masses with the average density of styrofoam?
The obvious starting point I guess is a core of very light elements, and a really really extended atmosphere. But an atmosphere thins out exponentially, more steeply the higher the gravity. So for an atmosphere to help much, those 40ish Earth masses of hypothesized core need to be spread out a whole lot already. It seems like a difficult planetary engineering problem -- spin it up almost to bursting?
So taking that to be too silly, the core must be only a small fraction of the mass: a big gas cloud with a nugget in the center. I'm not sure that could work, but it's what I'd try to work out next.
- jameshart 2y agoDyson sphere around a neutron star.
- perihelions 2y agoIt's basically explained in the article: it's probably just very hot—the atmospheric scale height[0] is proportional to temperature. The open question (per the article) is why it got so hot, because they don't have a model for that. ("It certainly requires a significant deposit of energy deep into the planet’s interior, but the details of the mechanism are not yet understood.“") [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_height https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_height