Thursday, October 5, 2017

Hot Jupiter WASP-12b is Black as Coal and Egg Shaped?


An exoplanet twice the size of Jupiter is hot, egg-shaped and coal-black.

Wasp-12b is a gas giant orbiting around a Sun-like star some 1,400 light-years away. It makes a complete orbit around its sun in just 24 hours because it lies so close to its star, and the proximity pushes the temperature to around 4,700 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s so hot that molecules there are broken down into atomic hydrogen and helium, and the extreme conditions give it an albedo of just .064, making the planet’s atmosphere even darker than asphalt.

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