Evaporating extrasolar planet

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, for the first time, astronomers have observed the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet evaporating off into space. Much of this planet may eventually disappear, leaving only a dense core. The planet is a type of extrasolar planet known as a 'hot Jupiter'. These giant, gaseous planets orbit their stars very closely, drawn to them like moths to a flame.

Credit: European Space Agency, Alfred Vidal-Madjar (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS, France) and NASA.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• extrasolar
• planet
• nasa
• esa
• eso
• hubble

[Farid51]

It's an animation ;)

[MazeleyFanClub]

Hmm. How would this be happening though? Planets form through accretion.  If it was being burned off like this, it could never have even accreted in the first place. So either the star got more luminous, the planet got closer to the star, or some kind of weird reaction produced new, lighter material that wasn't there during accretion, and subsequently started getting burned off.

[punji73]

@DoctorPloppers ah so thats how we could achieve warp speed, but i imagine they would learn to break the light speed barrier before they come up with that so we would have to make do in the mean time. also according to the law of reletivity warp speed would also make astronauts of the future time travellers!

[DoctorPloppers]

@punji73 Light travel isn't enough, you could use negative matter to travel afely through black holes or to acheive a form of "warp drive"

[scoutkidd]

schok!

[punji73]

what we need to do is master light speed travel then build a probe to head out there to one of those worlds, it would take like 40 or 50 yrs but once there it could take some pics and send them back to us within a few mins. im afraid that wont be within our life time of course but may not be too far off

[Nyctomancer]

All I can say is...

lol wut?

[johnsmdm]

they were unable to escape..all was lost..

[valeriomax]

Even as a piece of animation, it seems to show a gross error: the tail of evaporating gas should be pointing in an almost-straight cometlike tail.

[DeadliestReflex]

ya the gliese c really interested me! i dought itll be like earth though

[DeadliestReflex]

can,t. i dont think they have any yet...cuz some of them are like over 150 light years away... any way they havnt founf any earth like planets out of the 250+ planets they have found. and im not sure bout rogue planets.