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New Transiting Extrasolar Planet
Shooter6947 writes "A new transiting extrasolar planet has been announced -- the only other known object that passes between its star and the Earth each orbit, a situation known as a transit, is HD209458b. The new planet, OGLE-TR-56b, is 0.9 times the mass of our own Jupiter and 1.3 times Jupiter's radius. It is the closest-in extrasolar planet yet found, with its year being only 1.2 days! Read about it from a cnn.com article or from the original scientific paper."
29-hour day? Must be very very close to its star. Ah, I see, 1/50 of Earth's orbit. Hmm, 3000 degree atmosphere.
Hold off on the colony ships.
However good the odds are that there are Earth-like planets in the galaxy, what are the odds that any are within reach of any human exploration that will ever take place? It's a big place, and barring "warp drive" the prospects of anything more than observation seem dim.
Amazing what astronomers can do with impossibly minute signals over unimaginably great distances, esp. the inferences of size and density. I wonder what alien astonomers looking at our solar system are thinking? (Something like: "No chance intelligent life could exist there.")
Things like this make me feel good about the human race. Sure, we're rather argumentative, and spend most of our time fighting ourselves, but there is a chance that one day we won't. Right now we behave like a bored puppy that's been stuck inside the small kennel all of it's life. We might find something to do one of these days. We are finally figuring out how to look out the wire mesh that makes up our door, and noticing that there are other wire mesh cages out there. Whee!!! We (as a race) are growing. We're improving ourselves. We don't have very good control of our parts yet. (our "USA" part is about to launch an attack on our "Iran" part) but we *are* opening our eyes, and we *are* looking out there.
Nathan Brazil?
The new planet, OGLE-TR-56b, is 0.9 times the mass of our own Jupiter and 1.3 times Jupiter's radius.
My favorite heavenly body is the girl who lives across the street. I've named her OGLE-T&A-36DD. The best thing is that I don't even need a telescope to see her: binoculars work fine for seeing into her bedroom!
GMD
watch this
Not a class M planet.
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I did some back of the envelope calculations, so I might be totally off track, but this seems really funny object.
Look at the graphs of energy released vs proton number. It is very low, and incredibly steep at the start, peaks at iron, and goes down at the end(near uranium and other very heavy metals). This is why fusion (going from say 1 proton in hydrogen to 2 in helium) creates energy, as well as breaking something big like uranium in chunks also provides energy.
What this means is that any materials south of iron can be fusioned to create energy(though maybe not enough to self-sustain), and any north of iron can be fissioned to create energy, but iron itself is "nuclearly inert" (for lack of a better catch phrase), so it's possible the 'iron planet' is debris of a star, but it could never reach critical mass 'cause it already has.
Actually, iron, and everything above it, is fusible. The issue is that it requires more energy to get them to fuse then is gained by the fusion process. In practice, only one physical process produces enough energy to fuse iron: supernovas. Under those conditions everything above iron is formed. Why do you think we have heavy elements?
According to the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics' article, this is the farthest known planet @ ~1500 parsecs away (50 times farther than any discovered so far).
The writeup says the planet has 0.9 times Jupiter's mass, and the article says it has a temperature of 3100 F. This probably means it is not a true gas giant (whoopsie), but it is still hot enough to melt silicon and iron, so there's still no solid surface. Imagine a planet of magma. Were it to cool off, it should become a very large rocky object.
:).
As it is, there's nothing to land on, and it's too hot for a ship to survive. And even if it were cool enough to safely land on, the gravity would be too high for human habitation.
Hmm. That paints an interesting picture. A few relatively common substances (like aluminum oxide) should be solid at those temperatures. Depending on their buoyancy relative to other components (mostly silicates), you might end up with a solid crust (modulo enough convection churn to make the San Andreas fault look like a nice picnic spot). This of course assumes that enough oxygen was bound into oxides in the first place, instead of mostly being bound as water and being stripped early in the planet's life/blown away to the outer system during accretion.
As for dropping probes into that ocean, an aluminum oxide shell should work quite well. Tungsten carbide-coated graphite might work too, being even more temperature-resistant, as long as it doesn't alloy with the surface material. It would be neat to try, though I doubt we'll get a chance any time soon
How would you set up the electronics/instruments on the probe, though? Diamond semiconductors, carbon or tungsten wires, aluminum oxide optics? It's an interesting thought experiment.
I don't know what you were reading, but the website you link to says:
Orbital period: 3.524738 ± 0.000015 d.
which looks like ~3.52 days in the year to me.
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