Hubble catches a glimpse WASP-12b, an almost pitch-black exoplanet Scientists studying WASP-12b, an exoplanet 871 light years from Earth, have determined that it reflects almost no light, making it one of the darkest planets in space. The team has published their results in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal on Thursday. The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on board the Hubble Space …
"WASP-12b is about two times less reflective than the Moon"
"You mean half as reflective?"
I was going to quote one or two of the obvious howlers in this article butthere are so many of them that in the end I thought best just to ask el Reg to send Katyanna to school.
"I was going to quote one or two of the obvious howlers in this article "
Like the point that at 2600°C, the surface is getting towards hot enough to boil iron(1), so glows rather more brightly than "slightly red like hot metal".
(1) The analytical part of my brain knows this is possible, but the other bit gibbers somewhat at the thought.
The one that really got me was the "44 times closer..."
I had to take the km distance and translate it to AU to get a meaningful comparison: about 0.02AU. I'm still not quite sure how 2% of the distance translates to "44 times closer".
Yes, it was a bit remiss to use that illustration without explaining it.
I believe it's meant to show that the orbit of WASP-12b around its star is close to its Roche Limit and is forming a ring.
Planets are held together by their own gravity but if you move a planet close enough to a star (its Roche Limit) then the gravitational tidal force from the star is greater than the gravitational force that holds the planet together. The result is that the planet starts to come apart and form a ring around the star. Saturn's rings, apart from the outer 'E' & Phoebe rings, were formed in this way.
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shurely this means our sun must be a dwarf?
Yep, a yellow dwarf. "A G-type main-sequence star (Spectral type: G-V), often (and imprecisely) [u]called a yellow dwarf[/u], or G dwarf star, is a main-sequence star (luminosity class V) of spectral type G. "
Main sequence stars (those fusing hydrogen) tend to be called dwarf stars, even when they get to multiples times Sol's mass. "Giant stars," in turn, are those fusing something other than hydrogen in their core (helium or heavier elements) and consequently inflate substantially in size to deal with the extra heat. This can result in oddities: our future Sol, when it enters the red giant phase, will be less massive than its current dwarf state.
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