Posted on 05/09/2020 10:40:44 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
We can now add atmospheric craziness to WASP-79b's already substantial exotic appeal.
The gas-giant exoplanet, which lies about 780 light-years from Earth, circles extremely close to its bright host star, completing one orbit every 3.7 Earth days. That proximity makes WASP-79b scorching hot, with an average temperature around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius), NASA officials said.
All that heat puffs up WASP-79b substantially, making it one of the largest alien worlds ever observed. Although WASP-79b is just 85% as massive as Jupiter, it's 1.7 times wider than our solar system's biggest planet.
Then there's the alien world's air, which researchers have now probed in considerable detail. Iron rain likely falls through WASP-79b's skies, which probably sport a very alien yellowish hue, a recent study reports. (Yellow on the dayside, that is; like other "hot Jupiters," WASP-79b is likely tidally locked to its host star, always showing it the same face.)
The scientists behind the new research studied WASP-79b's atmosphere using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Magellan Consortium's Magellan II Telescope in Chile. These observations showed no signs of "Rayleigh scattering," a phenomenon... which... explains why Earth's sky is blue... It's unclear why this phenomenon may not be occurring on WASP-79b, study team members said.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Water planet construction... a long cylinder of stony material, set to retating to mimic Earth's, and add about four times Earth's volume worth of water (minus the mass of the cylinder). Pllt, water planet, and the cylindrical core pulls out an appropriate amount of spin-induced oblateness.
whoops, retating= rotating
Oh, the sky was yellow and the sun was blue...
That sounds like a home recipe.
lolol.
I’d like my water planet with a side of salsa please.
That’s exactly what AOC thinks is happening here in 11.23 years.
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