This “Roasted Exoplanet” Has a Wild Orbit
SMRTR summary
Seventeen years ago, astronomy students stumbled upon one of the strangest planets ever found, a gas giant with an orbit so wildly elongated it looks more like a comet's path than a planet's. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has taken a closer look, and what it found is staggering.
HD 80606 b, nicknamed the "roasted exoplanet" by NASA, swings ten times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun, and during that scorching approach, its surface temperature spikes by 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, far hotter than scientists previously thought.
"Hot Jupiters are already considered some of the most extreme exoplanets we know of, but even among that population, HD 80606 b is one of the most extreme," said Tiffany Kataria, the study's principal investigator.
The planet's violent temperature swings also trigger "shock-wave storms" with winds screaming at 11,000 miles per hour. Even by the standards of the cosmos, this one is a beast.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Nautilus.
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