“We have mapped the temperature variations with longitude across the entire surface of a planet that is so far away, its light takes 60 years to reach us,” said Heather Knutson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., lead author of the paper describing HD 189733b.
The two planets are “hot Jupiters” – sizzling, gas giant planets that zip closely around their stars. Roughly 50 of the more than 200 known planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets, are hot Jupiters. Visible-light telescopes can detect these strange worlds and determine certain characteristics, such as their sizes and orbits, but not much is known about their atmospheres or what they look like.
Since 2005, Spitzer has been revolutionizing the study of exoplanets’ atmospheres by examining their infrared light, or heat. In one of the new studies, Spitzer set its infrared eyes on HD 189733b, located 60 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula. HD 189733b is the closest known transiting planet, which means that it crosses in front and behind its star when viewed from Earth. It races around its star every 2.2 days.
Spitzer measured the infrared light coming from the planet as it circled around its star, revealing its different faces. These infrared measurements, comprising about a quarter of a million data points, were then assembled into pole-to-pole strips, and, ultimately, used to map the temperature of the entire surface of the cloudy, giant planet.
The observations reveal that temperatures on this balmy world are fairly even, ranging from 1,200 F on the dark side to 1,700 F on the sunlit side. HD 189733b, and all other hot Jupiters, are believed to be tidally locked like our moon, so one side of the planet always faces the star. Since the planet’s overall temperature variation is mild, scientists believe winds must be spreading the heat from its permanently sunlit side around to its dark side. Such winds might rage across the surface at up to 6,000 mph. The jet streams on Earth travel at 200 mph.
“These hot Jupiter exoplanets are blasted by 20,000 times more energy per second than Jupiter,” said co-author David Charbonneau, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “Now we can see how these planets deal with all that energy.”
Also, HD 189733b has a warm spot 30 degrees east of “high noon,” or the point directly below the star. In other words, if the high-noon point were in Seattle, the warm spot would be in Chicago. Assuming the planet is tidally locked to its parent star, this implies that fierce winds are blowing eastward.
In the second Spitzer study, astronomers led by Joseph Harrington of the University of Central Florida in Orlando discovered that HD 149026b is a scorching 3,700 F, even hotter than some low-mass stars. Spitzer was able to calculate the temperature of this transiting planet by observing the drop in infrared light that occurs as it dips behind its star.
“This planet is like a chunk of hot coal in space,” said Harrington. “Because this planet is so hot, we believe its heat is not being spread around. The day side is very hot, and the night side is probably much colder.”
HD 149026b is located 279 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. It is the smallest and densest known transiting planet, with a size similar to Saturn’s and a core suspected to be 70 to 90 times the mass of Earth. It speeds around its star every 2.9 days. According to Harrington and his team, the oddball planet probably reflects almost no starlight, instead absorbing all of the heat into its fiery body. That means HD 149026b might be the blackest planet known, in addition to the hottest.
“This planet is off the temperature scale that we expect for planets,” said Drake Deming, a co-author of the paper, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena.
For more information about the Spitzer Space Telescope, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer
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And in no way am i saying there is not something else out there. you would have to be completely naive to think that out of the billions of planets outside our solar system that no other lifeforms exists…. this is ignorance.
Sunspot formation, or more properly lack of formation is directly related to lack of gravitational displacement of the sun from the solar system center. The gas giant planets follow an alignment cycle that allows the sun to remain more at rest in the barycenter of the system. That is the gravitational effects are more balanced by the positions of the planets and the sun is not pulled as far from the solar system center as in the normal solar cycle. This lack of disturbance is reflected in a lower production of sunspots. The lower production of sunspots has been correlated to higher prices of food crops and lower temperatures for the past 300 years. A period as we are in now has not been observed for several hundred years. One note is that sunspots now are exhibiting a unipolar nature. That is the positive and negative areas are quite often centered directly over each other rather than one leading the other in the travel across the face of the sun. The reversal of the polarity of sunspots is usually an indicator of the end of one cycle and the start of another.
I'm going to copy and paste two small texts on light. It is really very interesting:
What kinds of light come from astronomical objects?
In our everyday human experience, we see that light has measurable properties. It has intensity (brightness), and it has color. The intensity gives an indication of the number of light “waves” or “particles” (called photons) coming from an object. The color is a measure of the energy contained in each photon. The colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet) denote the energies of light waves that our human eyes can see and interpret. This “color” or “energy” range is called the visible spectrum. Red photons of light have the least energy, violet photons carry the most energy. Until fairly recently, all of our astronomical knowledge came from the detailed study of visible light from astronomical objects.
Notice that radio, TV, and microwave signals are all light waves; they simply lie at energies that your eye doesn't respond to. On the other end of the scale, beware the high energy UV, x-ray, and gamma-ray photons! Each one carries a lot of energy compared to their visible- and radio-wave brethren. They're the reasons you should wear sunblock in the summer, for example.
When we look at the Universe in light of different energies, we probe different kinds of physical conditions — and we can see new kinds of objects! For example, high-energy gamma-ray and X-ray telescopes tend to see the most energetic dynamos in the cosmos, such as active galaxies, the remnants from massive dying stars, accretion of matter around black holes, and so forth. Visible light telescopes best probe light produced by stars (it's no accident that human eyes have adapted to be sensitive to “ROYGBIV” light like they are — after all, that's where most of the Sun's energy comes out). Going to even lower energies and longer wavelengths, infrared and microwave radio telescopes best probe dark, cool, obscured structures in the Universe: dusty star-forming regions, dark cold molecular clouds, the primordial radiation emitted by the formation of the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. Only through studying astronomical objects at many different wavelengths are astronomers able to piece together a coherent, comprehensive picture of how the Universe works!
And one more:
How do we see color? Sensing light
We perceive color when the different wavelengths composing white light are selectively interfered with by matter (absorbed, reflected, refracted, scattered, or diffracted) on their way to our eyes, or when a non-white distribution of light has been emitted by some system.
Visible light is merely a small part of the full electromagnetic spectrum, which extends from cosmic rays at the highest energies down through gamma rays, X- rays, the ultraviolet, the visible, the infrared, and radio waves to induction-heating and electric-power-transmission frequencies at the lowest energies. Note that this is the energy per quantum (photon if in the visible range) but not the total energy; the latter is a function of the intensity in a beam.
We can detect the range of light spectrum from about 400 nanometers (violet) to about 700 nanometers (red). We perceive this range of light wavelengths as a smoothly varying rainbow of colors — the visual spectrum.
This statement is not really accurate. We have found, yes, 500+ planets outside our solar system. However due to our limited technology, 90% of these planets are considered, “hot Jupiters” due to most of the discovered planets are massive gas giants so close to their parent star (closer than mercury). We have discovered potentially smaller planets that have been deemed potentially rocky, and some potentially in the habitable zone for life as we would know it. However just because a planet is found in the habitable zone does not make it “Earth-likeâ€. Mars is in the habitable zone, however due to a solidified core does not have a magnetic field and thus our sun has stripped its atmosphere away. We really have no idea the true composition of the 500+ planets we have discovered. It certainly is interesting, though we have only begun to track stars wobbles and light, so we can only confirm planets with short orbits. Not saying there are not many other Earths out there, though we have not found them yet.