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A Puffed-Up Extrasolar Planet

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the floats-like-a-beachball dept.

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.'"

2 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Astronomers... by /ASCII · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:Astronomers... by i_should_be_working · · Score: 5, Funny

      A biologist, a physicist and a mathematician are sitting at a cafe patio sipping coffee and watching the people go by. They see two people enter a nearby building. A few minutes later three people come out of the building.
       
      'Ah,' the biologist says, 'they must have reproduced'.
       
      'Nah,' says the physicist, 'three is within statistical error of two'.
       
      'Well,' says the mathematician, 'one thing is for certain: if someone walks into the building now, it will be empty'.