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Sizzling Weather On a Dive-Bombing Planet
The Bad Astronomer writes "A massive planet orbiting the star HD 80606 is on a roller-coaster orbit: it dive bombs the star, in just 55 days dropping from over 120 million km to just 4 million km from the star's surface! Astronomers used the Spitzer Space Telescope to observe the heat from the planet as it gets blasted by its star, and used that data to make a beautiful computer-modeled image of what the planet must look like. Their results: an ube-rviolent storm that acts as if a bomb were exploded in the planet's atmosphere."
A planet which gets really close to its primary is more likely to be tide locked because of the energy lost when the tidal bulge moves around. Mercury is in a 2/3 resonance for this reason.
If this planet is in a 1/1 resonance it will have one side which never gets baked at close approach, so conditions on the surface may not be as bad as they first seem.
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That's the biggest BBQ I've ever heard of!
sudo mount --milk --sugar
really really drunk.
Monstar L
Dive-bombing? This isn't Pearl Harbour the movie. Try "highly elliptical" orbit, and "close approach" or "close proximity". This is /. not 5th grade.
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...though "Flamebait" seems strangely appropriate for this topic.
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With conditions this extreme, I wonder if there is an atmosphere. Would it not get ripped away?
The article talks about supersonic winds - but how do we know?
Perhaps the atmosphere regenerates as the planet moves away from the star, only to be ripped away again in some kind of Promethian nightmare
Seriously, Did you mean uberviolent or maybe instead of making up a word, extremely violent.
This IS /. I actually got laid once in 5th grade!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
First of all, we're talking a planet considerably heavier than Jupiter, so presumably a gas giant. Or anyway it will have quite the pressure.
Second they said it produced explosive winds, up to 5 km/s. (Or "fucking unbelievably fast" in imperial units;) Because the air heats from 500 degrees to 1200 degrees on the hot side within hours, and expands, rushing towards the colder side.
That's over 5 times the muzzle velocity of an M16, BTW.
So, yeah, the conditions on the surface might not be as bad as they seem... as long as you don't mind winds strong enough to blast you to bits, not to mention that they're 1200 degrees hot ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Since fusion is not happening on the planet and it is a large gas planet, with a regular orbit one might expect a band structure of the atmosphere. As it is four times the mass of Jupiter (and thus likely larger), one might also expect that the storms are more intense, numerous, long-lived, and larger than on Jupiter occurring within the bands.
My question to someone more knowledgeable is whether or not such a planet, as described in the article, could sustain some sort of atmospheric band structure on one side of the planet? And, if so, could it maintain such a structure when close to its star? Given best circumstances of course, such as the geometry of the aforementioned prolate spheroid.
get a load of that :
Such is the life of HD 80606b, a gas giant planet four times the mass of Jupiter that orbits a star 190 light years from Earth.
and we think jupiter is huge. this thing is FOUR times the mass.
Read radical news here
OK the part I wrote about the ratio of the major to semi-major axis is wrong on at least two levels... I've been out of school too long. The value I was trying to describe is eccentricity.
I stand by what I said on the definitions, though; note how wiki distinguishes between circular and elliptical.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Anyone else reminded of the prison planet from Chronicles of Riddick?
"Accelerated by the starâ(TM)s gravity to a speed hundreds of times faster than a rifle bullet, the planet whips around the star and begins the long climb back."
The Earth moves at about 100,000 km/h around the Sun.
The FASTEST rifle bullet travels at 4000 fps.
4000 Feet per Second = 4389.12 Kilometers per Hour.
Earth travels 22 times faster than the fastest bullet! so this guy actually broke out a calculator and did some basic math! Very cool!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Civilization periodically destroyed every period due to the unique orbit of the planet.
Is it that one at the top? I get images like that looking cross-eyed at christmas lights. It's just a red blob with a blue corona on one side. I couldn't even tell it was supposed to be a planet unless someone told me.
PERL:
All of the power of Voodoo with most of the understandibility!
thank you for the link, the story is very interesting
but why did you adopt the rhetoric of a late night tv show presenter trying to sell us uninteresting crap?
the planet is interesting in and of itself. a dry technical description all by itself conveys the excitement of the find quite well, that's all that is needed to get us intrigued
you're not trying to sell us a shamwow, so drop the "whoa dude, ueberviolent!" act, its just mental noise we have to get past to appreciate the story
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you link through to the article, the article links through to an academic paper. The academic paper contains images from the computer simulation. And yes, they are better than the image shown in the article.
Ahhh. There we go. Yes, quite lovely. Hard to imagine that kind of temperature flux in the time spans they are talking about. I must have missed the link because it was only a slightly darker brown than the surrounding text and not underlined. If it's not underlined, I'm not clicking on it. That's the way I like my Internets :)
PERL:
All of the power of Voodoo with most of the understandibility!
Discover has REALLY gone downhill since Disney took over. In fact, that's when I quit taking the mag.
I mean, really. We're treated to ridiculous non-science phrases such as "Still suffering from the heat, the planet...." and "...the planet cools. But it's not enough. It's never enough."
A gas giant with no life "suffers". KA-WACK!!
Pablum such as this is why I quit reading Discover a decade ago.
There's only one thing I would really like to know: Whose 53 days are we talking about? The planet in question, or Earth's? They can't even be bothered to say "53 Earth days" or "53 of the planet's days."
What a load of crap.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
It's the planet Trenco where the Thionite grows! Now we just need to find Arisia and we are set.
The larger questions is how can such a massive planet end up in such a elliptic orbit. Assuming the gas giant was made from the swirling dust cloud around the star to start with then it would be in a almost circular orbit. What could have happened to change the orbit as much as this?
Wow. Just wow.
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