Comments on: Hottest Ever Exoplanet Discovered: WASP-12b

By: mychael

mychael — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 02:37:50 +0000

that is so cool that there is a new planet

By: Fernando Koch

Fernando Koch — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 01:57:19 +0000

Questions to the specialists:

- do you know whether there is a model to predict how "our system", which we know contains a Earth-like, life harbouring planet — would be detected using the current instrumentation from let us say 10ly, 80ly, 100ly, 200ly, …?

- if such model does not existi, what does it take to put it together (for numeric analysis) considering different visualisation angles, distances, etc?

- what else could be learned and detected from this model? e.g. presence of multiple sub-Jovian planets, presence of life-related chemical elements, etc?

It would be great to hear your throughts on that!! Please, email directly if I can contribute with teh data model and/or computer simulation!

Cheers-

F Koch

By: Frank Glover

Frank Glover — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 17:31:45 +0000

"Mmmm, is this going to make [gravity] waves? Can we detect them?"

Yes they'd be produced (as would Earth and the Sun, or any other two bodies orbiting each other), but they'd be insanely weak, even as gravity waves go, carrying away insignifigant energy over all but the very longest time frames.

Your best bets for gravity wave detection involve much more massive objects, moving much faster around each other. A close pair of neutron stars or stellar black holes, for example.

By: robbb

robbb — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 02:13:04 +0000

interesting discussion, as usual

By: Aodhhan

Aodhhan — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:22:21 +0000

I think what we are going to move towards, is a rocky planet is more than 60% formed before a star lights up. Which means planets are in a bath of gas and dust. When the star lights up and begins to clear out the area around itself, planets hold onto this gas. Bodies without much mass will eventually lose the ability to hold onto the gas.
To me, this is a much more likely reason the Earth has so much water, and it is likely Mars did as well, however it just doesn't quite have enough mass to hold onto its atmosphere.

Even now, the concensus is the large gas planets have rocky cores slightly larger than Earth. They were able to achieve even greater mass with the availability of ice/frozen matter, and a longer period of time before the solar winds cleared those areas. Allowing them to have much greater atmospheres than Earth, and continue to build mass until the solar system was cleared out by the solar winds.

With this in mind, I'm not at all shocked with the amount of "hot jupiters" we are finding.

Thankfully, the future holds quite a few projects which will increase our imaging capabilities of stellar nurseries, and within 20 years I believe we will have a very good understanding how our solar system evolved.

By: rob b

rob b — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:39:54 +0000

@ robbb
I would guess that if it’s that close and has been there for any length of time it must have a wicked magnetosphere. Other wise it presumably would lose a lot of mass to solar wind. All in all not a good place to live

By: Vanamonde

Vanamonde — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:38:13 +0000

Mmmm, is this going to make [gravity] waves? Can we detect them?

By: Jarod

Jarod — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:12:42 +0000

Wow, that is amazing!

By: robbb

robbb — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:36:53 +0000

@rob b – 'tides on the surface of the sun' – cool thought. along the same lines, would the proximity of the planet mean the star will literally the strip the planet to nothing over time? isn't a large jupiter simply a big ball of gas?

By: Bill

Bill — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:04:48 +0000

I'll second that doubt. Can the researchers positively eliminate a sunspot-like structure? I recall a previous article in which a star was reported to be hugely asymmetrical in its brightness, which was presumed to be a very large sunspot analog.

By: trueman832

trueman832 — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:55:49 +0000

Could this be yet another huge sunspot mistaken for a planet? It has been spotted via the transit method, has this been verified with the wobble method? And lastly, could this planet be in an elliptical orbit seen only at perihelion?

By: Dark Gnat

Dark Gnat — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:42:58 +0000

I wonder if the planet is distorted due to tidal forces as well.

Also, are they sure that the orbit is stable? At some point, when one of these planets gets close enough, it should spiral into the star.

That would be a spectacular event!

By: rob b

rob b — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 10:53:44 +0000

Being that close I wonder if it would cause “tides on the surface of the sun” if so how cool is that

By: joe

joe — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 05:54:19 +0000

93,000,000/40*2*3.14/24=608,375 mph = wow

By: joe

joe — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 05:47:00 +0000

So how fast is that planet actually moving in its orbit around its sun?

By: KC Wong

KC Wong — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 05:17:23 +0000

Can someone clear my doubts? We need house plans when building houses, we need drawings when buidling bridges. What can the Artist Illustration help us?

By: Chuck R.

Chuck R. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 01:51:12 +0000

Could we have caught this speedy hot giant on its way into its parent star?

By: Jorge

Jorge — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 01:41:09 +0000

At 1.5 Jupiter masses? Nope. No chance of "brown-dwarfism".

By: Nephish777

Nephish777 — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:20:02 +0000

Could this be a brown dwarf star instead of a planet?

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:39:28 +0000

Anyone want to go tanning?