Saturday, May 08, 2004

New fast, hot breed of planets found

"Most extrasolar planets appear to have made this inward migration, forming 'hot Jupiters'. But these new planets, believed to be rare, have been dubbed 'very hot Jupiters'. They lie about 50 times closer than Earth's distance from the Sun. The previous closest planet found lay at double this distance."





I'd like to see one of these up close. I can imagine some extremely gnarly tidal weirdness and gravity-driven pyrotechnics. Maybe these things aren't planets at all, but alien power stations of some kind. Or megascale brains for intelligences that have uploaded themselves into supercomputers.

No comments: