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.
Re:Rotation Period (Score:4, Informative)
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.
If the winds are strong enough in the atmosphere and the atmosphere is thick enough, it may not matter what side of the planet you're on. Just like Venus, which rotates very slowly, but is pretty much the same sizzling hellhole regardless of whether you look at the day or night side.
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:4, Informative)
With conditions this extreme, I wonder if there is an atmosphere. Would it not get ripped away?
Considering that the planet in question has four times the mass of Jupiter, I would assume that it has more than enough gravity to hang on to its atmosphere.
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> "A massive planet orbiting the star HD 80606 is on a roller-coaster orbit: it dive bombs ... results: an ueberviolent storm that acts as if a bomb were exploded
> the star, in just 55 days dropping from over 120 million km to just 4 million km from the
> star's surface!
> in the planet's atmosphere."
F***ing Republicans! >:(
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Within the article, you'll find that this is a gas giant. It's so large that its own gravitational effect causes its sun to swell on approach.
So then weather is going to suck on pretty much every planet in that system.
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Such a massive change in temperature is going to cause hellish weather fluctuations and winds across the whole planet no matter which part of the planet you are on.
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..
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All in all, still likely to be low on the vacation list for centuries and centuries to come.
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Well, how much slower would they be in the lower atmosphere? As the other poster pointed out, at the epicentre Nagasaki they had 1005 km/h winds. This has 3600s/h * 5km/s = 18000 km/h. So if at the ground the winds are "only" about 6% as bad, it would be "only" like being at ground zero of a nuke. For hours. That seems pretty bad all right :P
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Billy, have you tied your brick to the chain yet? Make sure to tie it on strong this time, you remember what happened to your last kite?
On a more serious note though, even here on earth, the wind speeds up top are generally much much faster than on the ground. While uncommon, 250knot (That's almost 500km/h) have been picked up by passenger airliners [airliners.net] and they don't generally go that high - and the higher up you go, the faster winds get.
S
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The orbit is very highly eccentric, which means the usual theory of tidal locking doesn't apply. The research uses a theory of spin pseudo-synchronization (Eq. 18 of this paper [arxiv.org]) to derive the planet's rotation rate in relation to its orbit. They do note there is an alternate theory of spin synchronization that, for simplicity, they didn't consider in this paper.
Whoa! (Score:4, Funny)
mod parent up (Score:5, Funny)
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No thanks, I'll keep the weather we've got here. I'm hoping for at least another foot of snow over the next month or so before it starts melting
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The city's power supply has maxed out at 10000 MW because of demand from aircons. There is talk of introducing new power meters which charge higher prices when demand goes through the roof.
On top of that we have had a run of bad luck. A truck got stuck with locked up air brakes on a train crossing. Half a million people cou
Maybe the planet is just (Score:3, Funny)
Don't dumb it down. (Score:5, Informative)
Dive-bombing? This isn't Pearl Harbour the movie. Try "highly elliptical" orbit, and "close approach" or "close proximity". This is /. not 5th grade.
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Reddit.com doesn't seem anywhere near as bad as digg. Actually for technical stuff it's quite a bit more tolerable than slashdot. Fanboys seem to have spammed the politics section to death though.
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You must be new here...
Mod Parent Up! (Score:1)
This IS /. I actually got laid once in 5th grade!
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Your pedantry is of no use here. The GP refers to a specialist vocabulary, which is allowed to have its own definitions.
As I recall, one such definition is 'highly elliptical' = ellipse that's stretched in one direction. In fact ellipticality (I probably got that word wrong) is given a number, the ratio of the major axis to the semi-major axis; a circle is 1, this planet mentioned would be around 30.
Scratch that (Score:2)
OK the part I wrote about the ratio of the major to semi-major axis is wrong on at least two levels... I've been out of school too long. The value I was trying to describe is eccentricity [wikipedia.org].
I stand by what I said on the definitions, though; note how wiki distinguishes between circular and elliptical.
Re:Don't dumb it down. (Score:5, Informative)
Highly elliptical means that the object's Orbital Eccentricity [wikipedia.org] is high - in this case, 0.927. A circle has eccentricity 0, and the Earth has an eccentricity of about 0.0167. If you don't consider that planet's orbit to be highly elliptical, compare its 0.927 to that of Halley's Comet: 0.967.
Note that there can be eccentricities >= 1, but they're not closed orbits.
For an interesting orbit, consider the Molniya Orbit [wikipedia.org] and its kin used by satellites that need long dwell times over high latitude areas.
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I'm having a hard time getting this... would someone re-post in terms of ping-pong balls?
Re:Don't dumb it down. (Score:4, Funny)
5km/sec? I don't understand that. What is that in libraries of congress?
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Seriously, Did you mean uberviolent or maybe instead of making up a word, extremely violent.
Strictly speaking ueber [wikipedia.org] is correct, though it's still a stupid word.
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It's only spelt ueber cos keyboards aimed at the English speaking markets don't have umlauts! (ie. the two dots that would normally be above the u to give it a 'ue' sound.)
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The real question is, does the word umlaut itself contain umlaut(s) over one or both u's? That would be sweet.
Neither...
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 s
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As it is four times the mass of Jupiter (and thus likely larger),
Actually, Jupiter is about as big as they get, diameter-wise, all the way to brown dwarf stars. As mass increases, they only get denser, not bigger. Just consider Jupiter and Saturnus, their size is pretty close, though Jupiter has more than three times the mass
Wow. we, as Sol, dont amount to sh@t (Score:2)
get a load of that :
Such is the life of HD 80606b, a gas giant planet four times the mass of Jupiter that orbits a star 190 light years from Earth.
and we think jupiter is huge. this thing is FOUR times the mass.
Crematoria (Score:1)
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Yes, this image comes to mind [goodschist.com].
Wow an actual educated journalist! (Score:2)
"Accelerated by the starâ(TM)s gravity to a speed hundreds of times faster than a rifle bullet, the planet whips around the star and begins the long climb back."
The Earth moves at about 100,000 km/h around the Sun.
The FASTEST rifle bullet travels at 4000 fps.
4000 Feet per Second = 4389.12 Kilometers per Hour.
Earth travels 22 times faster than the fastest bullet! so this guy actually broke out a calculator and did some basic math! Very cool!
Reminds me of Nightfall (Score:3, Interesting)
Civilization periodically destroyed every period due to the unique orbit of the planet.
Where's the 'beautiful computer-modelled image'? (Score:1)
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What a load (Score:1)
Discover has REALLY gone downhill since Disney took over. In fact, that's when I quit taking the mag.
I mean, really. We're treated to ridiculous non-science phrases such as "Still suffering from the heat, the planet...." and "...the planet cools. But it's not enough. It's never enough."
A gas giant with no life "suffers". KA-WACK!!
Pablum such as this is why I quit reading Discover a decade ago.
There's only one thing I would really like to know: Whose 53 days are we talking about? The planet in question,
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Well, you might as well talk about it with such hyperbole, as the whole story is incredibly hyperbolic. It is a computer simulation of what might "possibly" be a planet. They were able to find some infrared signatures, and they turned that into an entire weather system? How many untestable assumptions have to be made along the way to get there from here?
Trenco (Score:1)
It's the planet Trenco where the Thionite grows! Now we just need to find Arisia and we are set.
How did it form? (Score:1)
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The article mentioned that it was probably caused by the companion star in the binary system.
Eventually this planet will collide with it's star and make a very pretty light show...
Wow (Score:1)