Sizzling Weather On a Dive-Bombing Planet 57
The Bad Astronomer writes "A massive planet orbiting the star HD 80606 is on a roller-coaster orbit: it dive bombs the star, in just 55 days dropping from over 120 million km to just 4 million km from the star's surface! Astronomers used the Spitzer Space Telescope to observe the heat from the planet as it gets blasted by its star, and used that data to make a beautiful computer-modeled image of what the planet must look like. Their results: an ube-rviolent storm that acts as if a bomb were exploded in the planet's atmosphere."
Rotation Period (Score:3, Interesting)
If this planet is in a 1/1 resonance it will have one side which never gets baked at close approach, so conditions on the surface may not be as bad as they first seem.
plantary Promethian punishment (Score:3, Interesting)
With conditions this extreme, I wonder if there is an atmosphere. Would it not get ripped away?
The article talks about supersonic winds - but how do we know?
Perhaps the atmosphere regenerates as the planet moves away from the star, only to be ripped away again in some kind of Promethian nightmare
Re:plantary Promethian punishment (Score:3, Interesting)
With 5km/s winds? (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, we're talking a planet considerably heavier than Jupiter, so presumably a gas giant. Or anyway it will have quite the pressure.
Second they said it produced explosive winds, up to 5 km/s. (Or "fucking unbelievably fast" in imperial units;) Because the air heats from 500 degrees to 1200 degrees on the hot side within hours, and expands, rushing towards the colder side.
That's over 5 times the muzzle velocity of an M16, BTW.
So, yeah, the conditions on the surface might not be as bad as they seem... as long as you don't mind winds strong enough to blast you to bits, not to mention that they're 1200 degrees hot ;)
Band structure (Score:2, Interesting)
Since fusion is not happening on the planet and it is a large gas planet, with a regular orbit one might expect a band structure of the atmosphere. As it is four times the mass of Jupiter (and thus likely larger), one might also expect that the storms are more intense, numerous, long-lived, and larger than on Jupiter occurring within the bands.
My question to someone more knowledgeable is whether or not such a planet, as described in the article, could sustain some sort of atmospheric band structure on one side of the planet? And, if so, could it maintain such a structure when close to its star? Given best circumstances of course, such as the geometry of the aforementioned prolate spheroid.
Reminds me of Nightfall (Score:3, Interesting)
Civilization periodically destroyed every period due to the unique orbit of the planet.