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NASA's Hubble Telescope Discovers An 'Evaporating' Planet (usatoday.com)
Researchers at the University of Geneva Switzerland have used NASA's Hubble telescope to find an exoplanet that's evaporating. The exoplanet, GJ 3470b, shows signs of losing hydrogen in its atmosphere, causing it to shrink. USA Today reports: The study is part of exploration into "hot Neptunes," planets that are the size of Neptune, sit very close to their star, and have atmospheres as hot at 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, says NASA. Finding a "hot Neptune" is rare because they sit so close to their star and tend to evaporate more quickly. In the case of GJ 3470b, scientists classify it as a "warmer" Neptune because it sits farther away from its star. The exoplanet discovered by astronauts is losing its atmosphere at a rate 100 times faster than a previous "warmer" Neptune planet discovered a few years before, according to a study published Thursday in the journal "Astronomy & Astrophysics." The planet sits 3.7 million miles from its star. For comparison, Earth is 92.9 million miles from the sun. Researchers say these "hot Neptune" planets shrink in size and morph into "Super Earths," versions of our planet that are massive and more rocky.
> as hot at 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit Are the still using Fahrenheit degrees in scientific domains?
It isn't "NASA's" telescope. It is a joint venture between the ESA and NASA.
No matter where you go, there you are. So Enjoy it.
Total bullshit. The mainstream news has been misreporting science due to incompetence since time was time. Literally every time I read an article about something I understand on a technical level I find that the author has got important details wrong, either because they failed to comprehend them entirely, or because they tried to dumb them down and failed miserably because you can only omit so much before what you are saying becomes outright incorrect.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not only science. A friend in economics complains about the same: economics coverage cuts corners and twist facts. A friend in military complains about the same: coverage of conflicts cuts corners and twists facts. I'm in computing, and the same happens. A logical step would be to conclude that most news are written by incompetent people.
At https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.051...
What is the big interest? Well, mostly that the population of "hot Jupiters" seems to be bimodal (two types of highest frequencies, but intermediate and extreme systems are present). This planet lays near the edge of one of those lower frequency bands, and is losing in the order of 10,000 tonnes/second of hydrogen - which sounds a lot, but over it's 2 billion year lifetime (less than half that of the Earth) only amounts to between 4% and 35% of it's original mass.
If there were other planets in it's system, that's really mess up their orbital stability, if they had any to start with (on the billion-year time scale). On the other hand, that gas takes a time to be driven out of the system, potentially providing a mechanism for "dynamic friction" to damp the instabilities produced.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"