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Interesting Planet Apparently Heating Its Star

Posted by michael on from the hand-warmer dept.

T. Panimaesh writes "A Canadian graduate student has discovered a planet which is heating the star it rotates around. 'Evgenya Shkolnik detected a spot on HD179949 that was 700 degrees warmer than the surrounding areas and circled the star at the same pace as the planet's orbit, once every three days. First seen in 2001, it also appeared in two sets of observations in 2002. It is probably not an intrinsic feature of the star, which takes nine days to rotate. Instead, the planet appears to possess a magnetic field that interacts with the star's magnetic field.' The 'roaster' planet being studied is almost as big as Jupiter, a gas giant planet in our solar system, and has 270 times the mass of Earth. It moves at 150 Kilometres per second, completing it's orbit in just 3.5 days."

10 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not to flame, but "NO SHIT!" by Randolpho · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Actually, I'm surprised it's almost as big as Jupiter.

    It should probably be much much larger.

    --
    "Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
    -Marilyn Manson
  2. In other news by Sklivvz · · Score: 3, Funny

    A hacker from Canada has been wardriving in said area and reported that the star's hotspot is IEEE 802.11 compliant.

    I wonder what use it would be with a 176yr ping time! DOH!

    --
    My Stack Overflow user
  3. Grav/Mag effects on solar convection by redelm · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The title is a misnomer. I very much doubt the planet is heating it's star or it would be losing energy and be very unstable.

    Most likely, either tidal or mag.field effects are changing the convection patterns inside the star. All stars are _much_ hotter in the core than on the surface, it wouldn't take much to influence these boundary-condition dependant internal convective flows.

    1. Re:Grav/Mag effects on solar convection by rpresser · · Score: 3, Informative

      There are serious theoretical reasons to believe magnetism AND tidal interactions are a factor. Related articles here, here (postscript) and here (postscript). (Can't read postscript? Get ghostscript, or read the text versions.

  4. Jupiter by Finuvir · · Score: 2

    Is it really necessary to tell us that Jupiter is a planet in our own solar system? I'm not from the USA , but I assume your educational system isn't that bad!

    --
    Why is anything anything?
    1. Re:Jupiter by SB9876 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I dunno about that. I went to a fairly decent high school near Seattle and remember when our Biology teacher gave us an impromptu geography test to satisfy his own curiosity about the state of our geography knowledge. It was a world map with no country borders drawn in and we had to roughly draw in and label something like 20 countries and the oceans.

      I was fairly happy that I got everything correct except to put Mongolia on the South side of China. My friend managed to put Britain where France is. Most of the class got fewer than 1/3 of the countries right. Several people didn't know where the PACIFIC OCEAN was. (Hint: if you're living in Seattle, it's the big bunch of water next to you on the map)

      Even worse, about 1/2 of the class didn't know where Canada was. (Somebody put Vietnam where Canada is at, seriously) 5 people DIDN'T KNOW WHERE THE US WAS on a map. I'm sorry but if you can't even find your own country on a map, you need to be beaten.

      I''m not sure if that was more depressing than when I was doing writing tutoring as an undergrad at the University of Washington (a fairly selective 4 year public university, or so I thought) and I regularly had to show people how to write a sentence.

      Yes, you read that right. Several times, I had to show people enrolled at a university the basics of subject-verb-predicate. Oh yeah, most of them didn't know what a paragraph was either - as in they'd never heard of one.

      During a brief stint at a community college, I had a geography teacher that didn't know how orbits worked. He was somehow under the impression that as soon as you left the atmosphere, you just kinda hovered in space as if it were made of Velcro or something. Nice old guy, crap teacher though.

      So yes, it's probably not a bad idea to reiterate that Jupiter is one of the planets.

    2. Re:Jupiter by Finuvir · · Score: 2, Funny

      I stand both corrected and deeply appalled. But anyone could have missed Canada, all tucked away down there.

      --
      Why is anything anything?
    3. Re:Jupiter by squiggleslash · · Score: 2, Funny

      Jupiter is also a city just north of West Palm Beach in Florida. It's quite conceivable that someone, somewhere, would have thought "You mean the city? Well of course this planet's going to be larger, I mean, Jupiter's just the usual collection of stripmalls and closed condo communities you get all over Florida, it isn't that big. It's quite hot though, perhaps that's the reason they're mentioning it."

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  5. Of Course it is going to affect the star by Slick_Snake · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Think how close the planet must be to the star to make a complete rotation in 3.5 days.
    A year on Mercury takes 87.97 Earth days; it takes 87.97 Earth days for Mercury to orbit the sun once.

    Logicly the planet must be closer much closer than Mercury is to our Sun. I could just be a phenomenon similar to the tides caused by the moon.

  6. Imagine a planet completely populated by women by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Obviously it's completely populated by women and with no one to stop them they keep cranking the thermostat up...