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A Puffed-Up Extrasolar Planet
Maggie McKee writes, "New Scientist Space reports astronomers have found a planet less dense than a wine cork and 38% larger than Jupiter. It circles a star about 450 light years from Earth. A similarly bloated planet has been found before (HD 209458b), so these puffed-up planets may be quite common. But no one knows how they got so swollen. One possibility is 'that some poorly understood mechanism has separated hydrogen and helium in each planet.'"
Maybe it's just their time of the month. Better keep your distance.
with a chewy center, not a hard center inside.
probably not much of a rocky core
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I love astronomy. In what other science does discovering two instances of the same thing make something potentially 'common'?
Reminds me of an old joke. An astronomer, a physisist and a mathematician are traveling on a train through Scotland. Through the window of the train they notice a black sheep.
"Aha," shouts the astronomer. "In Scotland, all sheep are black."
"Nonono, " says the physist. "We only know that there are black sheep in Scotland, not that all scottish sheep are black."
The matematician looks furiously at the other two and almost screams "In Scotland there is at least one sheep with at least on black side!"
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
what is that in libraries of congress? or volkswagens? or Oprahs?
Maybe they're made of marshmallow. You ever seen how big one of those things can get in the microwave?
This guy's the limit!
They usually do a pretty good job with new science (and space) news. Plus, they have an interesting podcast, if you guys haven't listened to it before.
As to the link, for some reason the newscientistspace.com site isn't accessible to me at the moment. It is quite strange that there exist planets with such a low density. It would be very interesting to be able to send a mission to a planet like this some day and find out a little more about what factors possibly came together to create something with such a low density.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
Now it's stars having fat children.
Can we send them to galactic fat camp to trim down?
Yes, but where do you get a bathtub that big?
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
Where's the wine bottle to use it on? I think wineries should start working on that now.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Looks like they found Majipoor.
Yet Another Web Site
When I read Puffed Up Planet, I thought it was new geeky cereal. :(
RTFG - Read The F#$%ing Google!
If the cork is 1.38 Jupiter Volumes, how big was the bottle?!?
A similarly bloated planet has been found before (HD 209458b), so these puffed-up planets may be quite common.
Right you are, Ken, you needn't look further than Kirstie Alley.
So, a twice-observed occurence makes a possibly common universal feature, and to explain it, we have a poorly-understood mechanism that somehow does something we don't understand with an effect we can't mimic. Ah, the joys of physics. :-)
Touting MyEclipse AJAX Tools
"The number two is impossible," - Isaac Asimov in The Gods Themselves.
The meaning being that there may be none of something in the universe, there may be one of something, but if there are two, there are lots more than two. Actually, in this case he was referring to universes themselves, not just things in the univrerse, but the point is the same.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I think it is facinating that scientists can now observe the mating rituals of planets. I assume that these planets are making themselves look larger for potential mates. Soon, we will have scores of baby planets running around, which might answer questions about litter sizes among planets.
Rhapsody in Numbers
.... It's more like Kodak film.
A similarly bloated planet has been found before (HD 209458b), so these puffed-up planets may be quite common
Maybe these bloated planets are the only large enough for us to be able to see at this point.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
But will they ever find a planet more dense than a Slashdot editor?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I see my self as a child being disappointed the moon wasn't made of green cheese and now I'm told there are Sta-Puff Marshmallow planets, Cooooool!
Bloated planet? They really need to observe it for a few *months* and make sure there's no periodicity to it, just in case. Ba-dum-bump.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
That's what they look like after they are done mining them for the denser, rarer materials.
o.0
The puff planet paper is at arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609369
These are no longer classified as planets. They do not orbit the sun. The recent stupid IAU definition of a planet says if it doesn't orbit the sun (not a sun or a star but the sun) it's not a planet. Same for 'dwarf planet'
I propose we call them extrasolar goobledygooks. Perhaps the IAU will vote that in too.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
FTA: "Computer analysis of long-term observations by HAT revealed that one of a pair of Sun-like stars 450 light years away dims by about 1.5% every 4.5 days. Follow-up observations this summer using large telescopes in Hawaii confirmed that the dimming is due to a planet half as massive as Jupiter passing or "transiting" across the star's face during its orbit." I'm not a math/physics major, but I would assume that for that orbital period the distance could not be too large at all (Mercury in comparison has a year of 88(earth)days) Considering that a planet half as massive as Jupiter has a "year" of 4.5 days, one would imagine that forces the planet is experiencing are extreme, almost to the point where I would question if there was a gap between where the sun stops and the planet starts.
........... Sorry, I've got nothing.
This is NOT a cork folks it is a CHEEESE PUFF, get it right!