An artist's rendering of the hottest planet, the source of UCF Professor Joseph Harrington's most recent research. [Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech.]
Posted on 06/12/2007 9:55:31 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
"The high heat would make the planet glow slightly, so it would look like an ember in space, absorbing all incoming light but glowing a dull red," said Harrington.
Drake Deming, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, and a co-author of the Nature paper, thinks theorists are going to be scratching their heads over this one.
"This planet is off the temperature scale that we expect for planets, so we don't really understand what's going on," Deming said. "There may be more big surprises in the future."
Harrington's team on this project also included Statia Luszcz from the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University, who is now a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Sara Seager, a theorist in the Departments of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Jeremy Richardson, an observer from the Exoplanet and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA Goddard, round out the team.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.ucf.edu ...
An artist's rendering of the hottest planet, the source of UCF Professor Joseph Harrington's most recent research. [Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech.]
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Can we name it Hell?
Carbon offsets could have saved this planet.
Global warming?
[/sarc]
and to think...
I just thought the UFC was full of dumb fighters
[rimshot!]
The temperatures of the upper atmospheres of giant planets have long presented a conundrum to astronomers. They are hotter than can be explained by absorbed sunlight, and other attempts to explain the temperature anomalies in mechanical terms have met with failure. The electrical theorists suggest that such problems will persist as long as astronomers ignore electricity.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/070312saturnheating.htm
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