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Space Science

Interesting Planet Apparently Heating Its Star 59

Posted by michael from the hand-warmer dept.
T. Panimaesh writes "A Canadian graduate student has discovered a planet which is heating the star it rotates around. 'Evgenya Shkolnik detected a spot on HD179949 that was 700 degrees warmer than the surrounding areas and circled the star at the same pace as the planet's orbit, once every three days. First seen in 2001, it also appeared in two sets of observations in 2002. It is probably not an intrinsic feature of the star, which takes nine days to rotate. Instead, the planet appears to possess a magnetic field that interacts with the star's magnetic field.' The 'roaster' planet being studied is almost as big as Jupiter, a gas giant planet in our solar system, and has 270 times the mass of Earth. It moves at 150 Kilometres per second, completing it's orbit in just 3.5 days."
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Interesting Planet Apparently Heating Its Star

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  • "The 'roaster' planet being studied is almost as big as Jupiter, a gas giant planet in our solar system"

    If ANYBODY here did not know that... well, kill yourself. You have no right to be anywhere near a computer, let alone a "News for Nerds" site.

    • Actually, I'm surprised it's almost as big as Jupiter.

      It should probably be much much larger.
      • Why should it be much larger? It probably has a metallic hydrogen core, which creates the strong magnetic field. This field interacts with the star's outer shell and magnetic field (say by compressing parts of the outer shell) and thus creating the hotspot on the star.
        • Well, just your basic law of averages. Most of the planets we've been able to find have been much larger than Jupiter. We've only recently been able to detect Jupiter-size planets.

          It's not a difficult extrapolation.
      • 1. Why
        2. Do you have any idea how big jupiter is ? it BIG. e.g the orange spot/storm commonly seen on jupiter images is the size of earth

        • Re:Not to flame, but "NO SHIT!" (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Actually, the "great red spot" is about 3 times the size of the Earth.
        • Because it's very, very hard to identify a planet as small as Jupiter. Jupiter is big for our system, but small compared to some of the behemoths [nasa.gov] that have been discovered (like HD 168443 c). However, if he looked at the list I just linked to, he'd know that a few rather small planets (probably still Jovians, but smallish ones) have been identified.

  • In other news (Score:3, Funny)

    by Sklivvz ( 167003 ) * <`marco.cecconi' `at' `gmail.com'> on Thursday January 08, 2004 @10:39AM (#7914346) Homepage Journal
    A hacker from Canada has been wardriving in said area and reported that the star's hotspot is IEEE 802.11 compliant.

    I wonder what use it would be with a 176yr ping time! DOH!

    • Earthlink (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I wonder what use it would be with a 176yr ping time! DOH!

      Obviously, you aren't an Earthlink user.
    • Cute .sig, though I spell it differently.
      Teehee you said 'anal'
    • I wonder what use it would be with a 176yr ping time!

      Data storage?

      With a 56,000 modem you'd have over 34,000 Gig of data in-flight at any moment.

      -
  • Is anyone else thinking that this gas giant houses a hyper intelligent race of celestial beings? Perhaps there is a satellite array which mantains the strange orbit and prevents the large planet from colliding with the star and destroying the system. Perhaps this array has an advanced energy system which creates the heat bursts we have detected!! AHA!!! Perhaps!!!
    • You want the Star Trek explanation?

      TOS: A scientist (who lives alone except for his beautiful daughter) is conducting dangerous energy experiments.

      TNG: Don't worry, it will be figured out in the last 15 minutes. Data and Geordi right now are trying to trace the source of unknown photocron emissions that were detected at the beginning of the episode.

      DS9: You already mentioned the race of celestial beings.

      Voyager: Whoever it is, I wonder if they want to eat some of Neelix's leftover burnt Antarean alpha-t

      • TNG: Don't worry, it will be figured out in the last 15 minutes.

        Maybe, but to be fair, you should have said that there was some moral dilemma involved: for example, another planet in the system needed the extra heat from the sun to live, and the people on the planet mentioned in this story were threatening to turn it off.

        Remember, TNG was a drama first, and sci-fi second. It was the ethical dilemmas around which the viewers needed to wrap their heads that kept the audience interested.
        • Yet, you have to admit that the show had too many of the "Data and Geordi try to figure out strange particles/emissions/transmissions/apparitions" type.
          • Yet, you have to admit that the show had too many of the "Data and Geordi try to figure out strange particles/emissions/transmissions/apparitions" type.

            Yeah, I'll give you that. It's too bad. These were most apparent in the early seasons, and in seasons 6 and 7 after a) Gene had passed away and b) most of the writing talent had moved to DS9.
    • Perhaps this array has an advanced energy system which creates the heat bursts we have detected!!
      Nah, I think they've discovered the Planet of the Overclockers.

  • Grav/Mag effects on solar convection (Score:4, Insightful)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @11:40AM (#7914945) Homepage
    The title is a misnomer. I very much doubt the planet is heating it's star or it would be losing energy and be very unstable.

    Most likely, either tidal or mag.field effects are changing the convection patterns inside the star. All stars are _much_ hotter in the core than on the surface, it wouldn't take much to influence these boundary-condition dependant internal convective flows.

    • Most likely they're right and you're wrong.

    • Re:Grav/Mag effects on solar convection (Score:4, Informative)

      by rpresser ( 610529 ) <rpresser&gmail,com> on Thursday January 08, 2004 @01:46PM (#7916475)
      There are serious theoretical reasons to believe magnetism AND tidal interactions are a factor. Related articles here [uah.edu], here (postscript) [obspm.fr] and here (postscript) [obspm.fr]. (Can't read postscript? Get ghostscript, or read the text [216.239.37.104] versions [216.239.37.104].
      • ...and if it's interacting with the star at all, then the changes must be dragging energy out of the planet, ergo, the planet's orbit will decay and probably swiftly. Magnetism is going to be a huge effect if the range is short enough for a 3.5-day orbit. Think dynamo. Think closer, and faster.
        • and if it's interacting with the star at all, then the changes must be dragging energy out of the planet, ergo, the planet's orbit will decay

          Not ture. The moon is interacting with the Earth - causing tides - yet that interaction is actually feeding energy into the moon and moving it further away.

          On the other hand the planet almost certainly did get that close by drifting in. Most likely it is accelerating in, but it is possible this effect has stabilized its position.

          and probably swiftly

          Only if you i
          • ...then you'll be several orders of magnitude out in your forces. If you run into a "squared" or similar factor anywhere in your terms, the butterfly can suddenly morph to StarGlider size.
            • This planet is 270 times the mass of Earth, or 1.6x10^27 kg.
              The velocity of the planet is 150 km/sec.
              Kinetic energy = 1/2 * mass * velocity^2.
              This planet's kenetic energy = 1.82*10^37 kg(m/sec)^2.

              E=mc^2.
              1.82*10^37 kg * (m/sec)^2 = mc^2.
              1.82*10^37 kg * (m/sec)^2 = m(3*10^8)^2.
              The kinetic energy of this planet is equal to 2^20 kg of pure mass.

              The entire energy output of our sun is 1.4 * 10^17 kg per year.

              You could take our sun and mount it as a (perfect efficency) rocket engine on this planet and it would
              • ...and awed at the effort you put in against my simple answer. I wasn't thinking of slowing it rocket-style but using magnetic braking. If it had been so braked, one would expect the planet's spin to be magnetically "tide locked" to the primary (like our own Moon) to a much greater extent than could be explained by gravity alone, and one would expect heating of the primary side of the planet in considerably greater degree than could be explained by radiation. I wonder if doppler on the limbs of the planet a
                • I wonder if doppler on the limbs of the planet and/or the planet's spectrum as a whole would be accurate enough to tell us anything about that.

                  An excellent idea, except I'm pretty sure it's beyond our capability at the moment. It would be like trying to study the sound spectra of a mosquito orbiting a jet engine. The signal is there, but the engine just too loud and too random.

                  There is hope with new interferometer telescopes. They get two simultaneous images and subtract one from the other down below the
  • Is it really necessary to tell us that Jupiter is a planet in our own solar system? I'm not from the USA , but I assume your educational system isn't that bad!

    • Re:Jupiter (Score:4, Interesting)

      by SB9876 ( 723368 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @02:39PM (#7917404)
      I dunno about that. I went to a fairly decent high school near Seattle and remember when our Biology teacher gave us an impromptu geography test to satisfy his own curiosity about the state of our geography knowledge. It was a world map with no country borders drawn in and we had to roughly draw in and label something like 20 countries and the oceans.

      I was fairly happy that I got everything correct except to put Mongolia on the South side of China. My friend managed to put Britain where France is. Most of the class got fewer than 1/3 of the countries right. Several people didn't know where the PACIFIC OCEAN was. (Hint: if you're living in Seattle, it's the big bunch of water next to you on the map)

      Even worse, about 1/2 of the class didn't know where Canada was. (Somebody put Vietnam where Canada is at, seriously) 5 people DIDN'T KNOW WHERE THE US WAS on a map. I'm sorry but if you can't even find your own country on a map, you need to be beaten.

      I''m not sure if that was more depressing than when I was doing writing tutoring as an undergrad at the University of Washington (a fairly selective 4 year public university, or so I thought) and I regularly had to show people how to write a sentence.

      Yes, you read that right. Several times, I had to show people enrolled at a university the basics of subject-verb-predicate. Oh yeah, most of them didn't know what a paragraph was either - as in they'd never heard of one.

      During a brief stint at a community college, I had a geography teacher that didn't know how orbits worked. He was somehow under the impression that as soon as you left the atmosphere, you just kinda hovered in space as if it were made of Velcro or something. Nice old guy, crap teacher though.

      So yes, it's probably not a bad idea to reiterate that Jupiter is one of the planets.
    • There was a NYT article yesterday about how the US National Park Service is "re-evaluating" plaques that it placed in the Grand Canyon expressing the theory that the canyon was created during the Biblical Flood and is only a few thousand years old. Apparently the Bush Administration wants the plaques to be kept in the park, and other (read "sane") people are shocked and awed by the ignorance involved. If a number of US citizens REALLY believe that the Grand Canyon was formed when Noah was on an ark, then
      • Actually, according the LA Times [latimes.com] the issues of Creationist theories and Bush-supported religious plaques are seperate. There is a book sold in the gift shops at the Grand Canyon that advances the Creationist theory of the canyon, written by a canyon guide. It has been moved from the science section to the inspirational section. As fas as I know, the Bush administration has no stance on this issue.

        Seperately, there are a few religious plaques in the canyon with inspirational Bible verses on them, but wit

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I would like to meet the person who thought that. I don't know what I'd do to them though. Bemused handshake, or piledriver? Perhaps that's what caused the problem?
    • Whilst discussing with a colleague a mutual acquaintance with unconventional views, I joked that he was probably from Venus.
      Her response: "Where's Venus?"
      I answered, "It's a planet."
      She replied "Oh." in a puzzled tone that left me with the distinct impression that she wasn't quite sure what a planet was.
  • Think how close the planet must be to the star to make a complete rotation in 3.5 days.
    A year on Mercury takes 87.97 Earth days; it takes 87.97 Earth days for Mercury to orbit the sun once.

    Logicly the planet must be closer much closer than Mercury is to our Sun. I could just be a phenomenon similar to the tides caused by the moon.

  • Imagine a planet completely populated by women (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Obviously it's completely populated by women and with no one to stop them they keep cranking the thermostat up...
  • Most of the planets we've discovered outside our solar system are gas giants orbiting very close to their parent stars. Is there any theories to how these planets formed? I remember reading somewhere that the gas giants formed in our solar system because they were so FAR away from the sun (something to do with ice crystals, and how they weren't vaporized becuase they were so far away from the sun). So how is it that gas giants in another solar system can be so close? And really close, I mean - the arti
    • The prevailing idea is that gas giants form at a distance and migrate inward, due either to hydrodynamic drag or a more complex mechanism that somehow binds the planet to the migration pattern of free material in the disk.

      You might also want to check this [angelfire.com] out.

      In answer to your other question, this system isn't likely to rip itself apart anytime soon.

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