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Jupiter-Sized Alien Planet Is Darkest Ever (Barely) Seen
thebchuckster writes "The darkest alien world ever spotted by astronomers has been discovered in the outskirts of our galaxy. 'It's darker than the blackest lump of coal, than dark acrylic paint you might paint with. It's bizarre how this huge planet became so absorbent of all the light that hits it,' David Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics."
What's happened to /. titling?
Is it darker than #000000?
Is it that big evil thing from the Fifth Element? Do we need four stones to make it fire a a giant Laser beam at it? Is it going to make evil people leak black tar?
fear of a black planet!
Here I am, sitting here with mod points, and I'm very disappointed at the poor quality of the comment so far...
That's no moon.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Maybe it's a Dyson sphere.
before changing planet formation theories?
Don't think anything that grand has been mentioned anywhere in TFA. The question is more along the lines of what mixture of vaporised rocks would make an atmosphere with those oddball properties.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Public Enemy called it!
if you would be so close to the sun, you would be scorched black too!
No, it's just someone's soot dump from when they cleaned their fireplace.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Surely they mean "orbiting"? "Circling" even? But "circumventing"?
I was about to make the same point, but the OED gives several meaning for "circumvent", one of which is "To go round, make the circuit of." Still, it is not the way that most people use the word; I think we can conclude that TFA is not written by one of the web's better science journalists.
Interesting choice of words - and since the star is some 750 light years away it seems unlikely that it would be orbiting.
Unless someone has invented the warp drive.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It is pitch black. Probably the home world of the grues.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Surely they mean "orbiting"? "Circling" even? But "circumventing"?
I was about to make the same point, but the OED gives several meaning for "circumvent", one of which is "To go round, make the circuit of." Still, it is not the way that most people use the word; I think we can conclude that TFA is not written by one of the web's better science journalists.
Or maybe not by a native English speaker?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's inhabited by aliens. They have almost perfected solar power, just like the asteroid in Ender's Game.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
It's also hot in infrared. Isn't this exactly what you would expect to see from a planet with a Kardashev level 1 civilisation?
Yeah, I mean, it was probably made in the vaporized rocks of Mount Doom or something like it
how long until
It's just another planet that couldn't pay it's bills so the Sun cut it off. Once again evil corporations have gone too far.
Which is the darkest non-ailien planet?
that would be Uranus
Good that someone final turn the spotlight and shed some light on this. Why do you turn of your lights and pull down the blinds if you have nothing to hide?
Maybe it's a red giant remnant (carbon core)?
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
It could just be a quirky, excessively tightly specified, phrasing during the 'dumb it down for the journalists' phase; but their might actually be a more astronomy-related reason:
If Kipping has had to get his hands dirty with any of the apparatus-side aspects of doing very precise optical telescope work, he may well have encountered substantially blacker-than-ordinary surface coatings being used to scrub unwanted light-scatter in sensitive optical gear. In the spirit of accuracy, he might have been emphasizing that your garden-variety "black paint" doesn't compare; but didn't want to just say "paint" because there are some very specialized black surface finishes that are less reflective still.(I think that the record is presently held by some curious carbon-nanotube arrangement that only reflects 0.045% of what falls on it.)
Returning no light is a tall order: If you are an efficient absorber of light, you'll heat up, and emit black-body radiation.(Assuming you don't just happen to occlude your star from the perspective of an earth observer during part of your orbit and get picked up that way, where being darker actually makes detection easier...)
There are probably some chunks of fairly dark and very cold material floating virtually undetectable in the void, but if you've got a nearby star irradiating you, it's just a matter of a trade-off between reflecting light and emitting it...
Maybe it's from 2001 "All the monoliths are black, extremely flat, non-reflective rectangular solids."
I remember Arthur C. Clarke's description of the blackness quite well, I'm thinking it was written slightly better than the summaries description of black.
Unfortunately I don't have the book with me.
You're not, but you're anon, so you get zero points.
TFA is wrong, the planet was discovered from a ground-based observatory back in 2006: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609335
>> Are we talking like optical black, suitable for coating the insides of instruments like telescopes and microscopes?
> Blacker! I'm talking black knobs with black legends on a black control panel black. It's so black it's frictionless.
(shamelessly reposted from another /. discussion a few years back ;)
Black! Black! Black like the clouds of death that follow me into the forest of doom and hide in the wardrobe of darkness!
Ref: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRJxafiqHvw
That would be Earth, as it is the only non-alien planet. If you mean "Which is the darkest planet in our Solar System", that would be Mercury with an albedo of around 0.1.
There was a manga years ago called 2001 Nights. It was a Sci-Fi anthology with a Kubrick/Clark 2001 influence.
In one of the stories a "10th Planet" is discovered in our solar system given the name Lucifer. It orbits our sun in a retrograde orbit (it goes the opposite direction of the other planets) and takes 666 years to complete an orbit. It's also the largest gas giant surpassing Jupiter. A mission to study the planet is launched and a number of tragic accidents befall the crew.
It was the first thing I thought of when I heard about this.
Maybe it's surface is made of polished platinum.. I jest, but I swear that stuff messes with my eyes; on one hand, it's shiny, but on the other, it's dark, almost black, and seems to just suck up light.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Isn't every planet other than Earth "alien?"
ceci n'est pas un sig
"It's so ... black!" said Ford Prefect. "You can hardly make out its shape ... light just seems to fall into it.
Camouflage, possible cloaking device. When you exist in a big black background, and you don't want anyone to find your home world, as the song says, "Paint it Black".
Of course one has to ask what sort of species takes such drastic action to hide themselves.
Is this a case of puppeteers, or simply stealthy invaders?
We're doomed!
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
or it didn't happen
But very few science references.
Personally, I suspect nanoscopic carbon, like fullerenes.
Little known fact: candle soot contains carbon nanotubes and fullerenes.
http://www.worldofmolecules.com/materials/fullerene.htm
Carbon nanotubes are also "The darkest substance known," and synthetic samples exhibit optical qualities similar to this planet.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7190107.stm
Now then-- If the planet originally had a high-methane content atmosphere, the solar bombardment may have slowly converted the methane into C60 fullerene and hydrogen gas. Fullerenes are heavy molecules, yes-- but they can be suspended in atmosphere even here on earth in a still room as "dust". The extreme wind velocities of a planet like this one would pretty much ensure a permanent cloud of the stuff, since it would be unable to settle. (Winds that would be further driven by the extreme solar absorption the molecules would provide.)
Fullerenes are highly conductive, so I would wonder about the electrostatic activity of such an atmosphere.
Please someone correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression that we've never seen any of the light reflected by a planet outside of our solar system. I thought the only methods of planet detection we currently have were to see the light it blocks from its host star, or to see the pull it has on its host star.
Oh, my, god. Becky, look at that planet. It is so big.
Yeah, it looks like one of those yellow-sun's satelite's...
But, ugh, you know, who understands those yellow suns?
Ugh, they only illuminate it because it looks like a total black hole, okay?
I mean its size, it's just so big, ugh, I can't believe it's just so round, it's like, out there, I mean, ugh, gross!
Look! It's just so... Black!
Cool post bro, highfive \o
We can find planets but, we cannot feed ours, find a better source of limitless fuel, operate a world without currency or sustain economies on programs other than war.
No wonder other planets refuse to respond to our SETI calls.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Please someone correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression that we've never seen any of the light reflected by a planet outside of our solar system. I thought the only methods of planet detection we currently have were to see the light it blocks from its host star, or to see the pull it has on its host star.
Only a few planets have actually been imaged through reflected light, the first in 2008, but it has been done. The two alternative methods you mention have been going on for longer though, and have found many more planets than the imaging method.