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A Planet Literally Boils Under the Heat of Its Star
The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers have found what appears to be a planet so hot it's literally vaporizing, boiling away from the heat of its star. KIC 12557548b was found using the transit method, periodically blocking some light from its star as it orbits around. But the amount of light blocked changes every transit. Given it's less than a million miles from the surface of the star, astronomers interpret this (PDF) as the planet itself turning to vapor, and the expanding cloud of rock-laden gas is what's blocking the starlight. The planet is most likely somewhat bigger than Mercury, but losing 100,000 tons of matter every second it'll only be around another few hundred million years."
Not a good alpha site?
Since there is less and less land, wouldn't that make it more and more valuable?
You could say you bought a hot commodity.
It's numbers like this that really make my head spin.
Yes, I get that planets are big items, and space is big and vast ... but I can't even begin to imagine the sheer amount of material we're talking about in even just a few hours, let alone the next "few hundred million years".
Anybody got a car analogy or something which might put these numbers into a little better perspective for those of us who don't work on scales like this?
I can't even begin to wrap my head around it ... a google search for one of the biggest things I could think of says that a Nimitz class aircraft carrier is about 101,000 tons. I saw one once, and it was utterly huge.
The idea of something that big boiling off every second for a few hundred million years makes my head hurt.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hopefully, that's metric tons; and therefore mass, not weight.
Don't trust any concentration of power.
A ton is a unit of mass and thus independent of gravity. I also dare say that we're talking about metric tons here, i.e. 1 ton = 10E3 Kg.
If it was that close to begin with, how'd it coalesce into a planet in the first place? Either this planet has been spiraling in for eons, it's a victim of a collision, or the star has been getting warmer since planet formation.
Don't trust any concentration of power.
i believe you're confusing mass vs. weight. weight is the force being exerted due to gravity. mass is the amount of matter.
Anyone else got the planet Crematoria in it's mind?
Actually, shouldn't an object have a little bit less mass when bound to a gravity well than in deep space since it has lost some of its potential energy (the binding energy of the system)?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
And really, it applies not just to distances, but masses, speeds, etc. As a rule of thumb, if it even deserves being mentioned in astronomy, it's frikken mind-bogglingly big.
The Earth, for example, is 6x10^24 kg, so basically 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. Or about 600,000,000,000,000,000 Nimitzes.
Or more to the point of the planet being discussed here, they say it's a little bigger than Mercury, which in turn is 3.3x10^23 kg. I.e., 330,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.
Yeah, that's the kind of numbers that astronomy is about. Well, not really. These are small planets. Now stars and black holes and galaxies, that's the real bread and butter. And you can pretty much stick the zero key down and go brew some coffee, if you want to write the weights for that.
And then come the distances, yes. Douglas Adams was certainly up to something there.
You know where in Men In Black, agent K says, "You want to stay away from that guy. He's, uh, he's grouchy. A three hour delay in customs after a trip for 17 trillion miles is gonna make anybody cranky." You'd think 17 trillion miles is half-way across the galaxy, right? Actually the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 25 trillion miles away. So that alien would have had to make a stop at some cosmic gas station in between, if he only had a 17 trillion miles trip.
It's things like these that... well, let's just say they seriously put the kibosh on most nerds "we should totally do some SF thing right now" scenarios. E.g., since we talk mass, there are all the "oh, let's terraform [insert planet]" stupidities. Yeah, I don't think any of those actually calculated how many trillions of tons of ice comets they'd have to divert into Mars to make oceans and whatever their fantasy scenario involves. (There are 1.4x10^18 tons of water on Earth for example.) Nor where they'd come from, nor what the energy budget for that would be.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This universe is the beta version; God had to rush it out because the PHB promised the customer a bunch of features that weren't in the original design. He'll work these bugs out when he has time, right after he finishes commenting all the code for the benefit of the next guy who works on the universe.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Losing mass does not change the orbit unless the process of losing mass applies a net force on the planet. And it would only cause it to spiral inward if that net force was in the correct direction.
I'd actually written up a long pedanttastic post on how a ton is defined in terms of pounds and is therefore a unit of weight, while a tonne is defined in terms of kilograms and is therefore a unit of mass; but it looks like they've sneakily redefined the pound (in both the UK and the US) to be a unit of mass. The cads!
But as ton can be either 1000kg, 907kg, 1016kg, or even one of about five volumes, depending who you ask, I'd strongly recommend the metric spelling for clarity...
(It is not true I'm a card-carrying member of the Pedant's Society. It's actually made out of plastic.)
I'm no rocket scientist so maybe I'm missing something here, but if a planet loses mass in this way it should not affect its orbit. Take as an example, lets say some supergiant transformer takes out his sword and slices the moon in half. Each half has 50% of the mass of the moon. That doesn't cause both pieces of the moon to plummet toward the sun.
(circular) orbit is the equilibrium reached when the gravitational pull toward an attractor is balanced by the inertial energy of the mass which is trying to move the object away from the attractor. Both have a linear relation to change of mass of the object in orbit, and the two contribute an opposite force, so if you change the mass, the object should remain in the same orbit. (if you lower the mass, you lower the gravitational attraction and lower the inertial energy)
This is the same reason astronauts don't get hurled off into space when they step out of their spacecraft. And the spacecraft also remains in the same orbit when the astronaut leaves it.
If you want to make something fall toward its attractor, you need to slow it down. That lowers its inertial energy without affecting the gravitational attraction. Or let it collide with a mass that does not have the same inertial vector. (increasing the mass attraction, without an equal increase in overall inertial energy)
I suppose another basic way to view an object in orbit is to view all the particles of the object as independently in the same orbit. Group them any way you want, they are still in the same orbit. Even if some of it turns from rock to gas. The gas remains in the same orbit along with the rock.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Using telescopes to peer at super-hot stars stripping their companions usually gets you arrested.
It certainly weighs less. The mass is the same.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
I can't think of a polite way of saying this, so I'll just say "bollocks".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
i prefer to think it's being strip mined
(It is not true I'm a card-carrying member of the Pedant's Society. It's actually made out of plastic.)
I think you mean "Pedants' Society", unless you're the sole member.
Ydco co
Assuming 1000kg, wouldn't 100,000 tons then be 100 gigagrams? I've often wondered why we so readily apply an SI prefix to bits and bytes but almost never to things like grams and metres, apart from only 'kilo'.
I was born in Perth, Scotland, where g is about 9.82 m/s^2. I now live in Reading, England, where g is about 9.81 --- a small difference, but measurable. If I were to go to Mexico City, it would be 9.78.
There's a wikipedia page with a big table.