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."

Comments

Whoa!

[dov_0]

That's the biggest BBQ I've ever heard of!

Maybe the planet is just

[antifoidulus]

really really drunk.

mod parent up

[MichaelSmith]

...though "Flamebait" seems strangely appropriate for this topic.

Re:Don't dumb it down.

[Nimey]

5km/sec? I don't understand that. What is that in libraries of congress?

Re:Band structure

[Urkki]

As it is four times the mass of Jupiter (and thus likely larger),

Actually, Jupiter is about as big as they get, diameter-wise, all the way to brown dwarf stars. As mass increases, they only get denser, not bigger. Just consider Jupiter and Saturnus, their size is pretty close, though Jupiter has more than three times the mass