Artists impression of a "puffy" planet. A comparison to Jupiter is in the bottom right
Exoplanets just fascinate me. The fact that there are potentially millions of other planets and planetary systems in outer space just blows my mind. Planets are being discovered literally on a daily basis. In the past week almost 100 new exoplanets were discovered or confirmed by various telescopes and space agencies. So today I thought I'd talk about a few of the most interesting ones.
Corot-2b: This planet was discovered back in 2007, but a huge discovery about it's interaction with its host star has just been made. The Chandra X-ray observatory just discovered that this planet is being pummeled by X-rays from Corot-2! X-rays are not good for humans, and they are not good for planets either! This roughly 3 Jupiter mass planet is being hit by 100,000 times more X-rays than the earth gets hit with every day. These harmful rays are evaporating the gas that the planet is made of at a rate of 5 million tons per second! Now I know that sounds like a lot, but the planet is so massive that at this rate of evaporation it will still survive for over 30 billion years!
HAT-P 32b, 33b, 24b and others: These are what I like to call "puffy" planets. Puffy planets are half to one Jupiter mass in weight but two Jupiter radii or larger in size and orbit their host star on the order of days. Essentially they are really big, lightweight, fast orbiting planets. They are peculiar because one would expect the planets to be smaller either due to solar wind/X-rays stripping material from them, or just general gravitational collapse of their small amount of gas. Astronomers are currently working on models to describe such planets.
HD 85512-b: This is today's newest possibly habitable planet. HD 85512-b is orbiting a star about 3/4 the size of our sun with an orbital period of 58 days. It's technically too close to the star to be in the habitable zone, but if the planet is rocky, and has sufficient cloud cover, it could potentially be habitable. Much more work needs to be done before we will know if it has the potential to support life.
