| Title | Hot Jupiter Exoplanet May Have a Comet-Like Tail | |
| Date | Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:16AM | |
| Author | n1 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the blaze-of-glory dept. | ||
A newly discovered gas giant exoplanet has a surface that is hotter than red dwarf stars (>4000 K):
With a day-side temperature peaking at 4,600 Kelvin (more than 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit), the newly discovered exoplanet, designated KELT-9b, is hotter than most stars and only 1,200 Kelvin (about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than our own sun. In fact, the ultraviolet radiation from the star it orbits is so brutal that the planet may be literally evaporating away under the intense glare, producing a glowing gas tail.
The super-heated planet has other unusual features as well. For instance, it's a gas giant 2.8 times more massive than Jupiter but only half as dense, because the extreme radiation from its host star has caused its atmosphere to puff up like a balloon. Because it is tidally locked to its star—as the moon is to Earth—the day side of the planet is perpetually bombarded by stellar radiation and, as a result, it is so hot that molecules such as water, carbon dioxide and methane can't form there.
[...] In 2014 astronomers spotted the exoplanet using one of two telescopes specially designed to detect planets orbiting bright stars—one in the northern and one in the southern hemisphere—jointly operated by Ohio State, Vanderbilt and Lehigh universities. The instruments, "Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescopes" or KELTs, fill a large gap in the available technologies for finding extrasolar planets. They use mostly off-the-shelf technology to provide a low-cost means of planet hunting. Whereas a traditional astronomical telescope costs millions of dollars to build, the hardware for a KELT telescope runs less than $75,000. Where other telescopes are designed to look at very faint stars in small sections of the sky at very high resolution, KELTs look at millions of very bright stars at once, over broad sections of sky, at relatively low resolution.
"Hot Jupiters", aka "epistellar jovians".
A giant planet undergoing extreme-ultraviolet irradiation by its hot massive-star host (DOI: 10.1038/nature22392) (DX)
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printed from SoylentNews, Hot Jupiter Exoplanet May Have a Comet-Like Tail on 2024-04-30 18:07:12