Help Me, I'm Melting
Hot Planet Orbiting Star More and more planets are being discovered and with these discoveries we are also discovering new types of planets. Perhaps one of the strangest of all is a planet that has just been discovered this month, January 2010. It is the first rocky planet that has been fully confirmed that is orbiting another star. We certainly couldn't live there and some of the things that happen there are really strange. Scientists are telling us that on this world it probably rains rocks. There are volcanoes on this world that are said to be releasing tremendous amounts of lava and on top of all that, the difference between dark side and sun side temperatures is so extreme as to almost a eliminate any chance of life. Some scientists are saying that what we think is a planet, could be what remains of the core of a former sun. The name of this place is CoRoT-7b. It was named after the French telescope that discovered the planet and is located about 480 light years from us. It is far closer to its parent star than we are, being at only a distance of 1.6 million miles. To give you an idea of how close to its star it is, you would have to move the planet Mercury 23 times closer to our sun to put it in the same orbit that CoRoT-7b is in. Distances like this make you wonder how the planet could even exist? It is hard to imagine how hot the surface of this world must be, or how it can retain any solidity. The planet always keeps the same face aimed at its star, sort of the same way that the moon always keeps its same face aimed at the Earth. Supposedly the temperature of this new world on the side that faces its sun is 4000°F. Somehow it seems that this might even be an under estimation, but in either case this place would be a pure hell that would truly test the new theory that life is so hearty that it can appear just about anywhere.
Planet CloseUp One really bizarre point about this world is the temperature of the planet on the side that faces away from the sun. It is estimated to be -350°F. It is hard to imagine a world that could contain such extremes of temperature. It certainly does make one wonder however, if there is a zone between the hot and cold areas that just might be able to support life? Will we find that the temperature in the cold zone will jump from extremely cold to extremely hot almost instantly, or will there be an area where the temperature gradually increases until it reaches hellish proportions? It may be that even if this is true in some places it may not always be true in others. Scientists are very excited over this discovery, because they think that they may have discovered a very new type of planet and that there may be others out there that were created the same way, that is from the cores of stars. Of course this is only a theory, and may not be the way this planet was created, but it is felt that there is a very good chance that this is what happened. It does make one wonder, if this planet was created from the core of a star, could there be others that were that we don't know about? What about our own Earth for example? Just because it is not running burning hot, or freezing cold, does it mean that it couldn't have originally been created from a star's core? Maybe it was created that way and that is why the center of the earth is so hot. The heat at the center of our planet has been attributed to many different causes, friction, gravity and other things. Wouldn't it be something if it turned out that originally it was from a star and that star as long gone?
Rock Rain In case you were wondering how hot the hot side of this new world is, let me give you an example. On the hot side of the planet, rock can be vaporized. Scientists believe that the hot side is so hot that no gases survive and that these gases have been replaced by vaporized rocks. Because of this they believe that instead of rain vaporizing as on Earth, rocks would vaporize and fall. Yes this is a strange world indeed. This planet has been classified as a new type, known as Super-Ios. There are other scientists that do not believe that this planet is actually made up of the core of a star, but rather made from remains of a gas giant planet, such as a Saturn. Complicating all of this is the theory by some scienctists that the way this planet appears, is not the same as the way it was originally created. If this is true, then it is much harder to picture the creation process. I say this because maybe both ideas could be wrong. There are just so many things in space that we do not understand right now, that some other process could have been responsible. Let's look at this from a different perspective. We believe that there are black holes in space that suck in matter, ripping it apart down to its atomic level. Many scientists also believe there is something known as a white hole, where matter from a blackhole escapes. Could a white hole have existed somewhere near the current location of this planet and could the material from that white hole have created this planet? For all we know the whole solar system in this area could have been created that way. So for there is no proof one way or another, on how this planet was created. Some scientists are saying that material is actually boiling off of the hot side of the planet. Does that mean that eventually the planet will disappear? Scientists are guessing that this planet was originally 100 times the mass of what it is now, which they estimate to be about five times that of the Earth. The planet also has twice the diameter of the Earth. Yes it does seem the planet was a lot larger at one time and also seems that if this keeps up it will resemble what happens to an ice cube when it is dropped into a glass of water. It slowly shrinks away until there is nothing left. It seems that the same fate awaits this planet. |
