Saturday, September 23rd, 2017 16:59:28
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This Mysterious Planet ‘Eats’ Light




This Mysterious Planet ‘Eats’ LightAuto & Technology

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There’s a black planet that is eating light, it is 871 light years from our solar system, the scientist has named it as WASP-12b. It’s roughly twice the size of the Jupiter, and the scientist describes it as black as fresh asphalt. They call it asphalt because it absorbs way more light than most of the planets, the scientist has measured the amount of light that it reflects, and the results were amazing.

Scientist measures the amount of light reflects by a planet in Albedo level, the WASP-12b only has an Albedo level of 0.064, that means it only reflects around 6% of the light that hits it. A Hubble space telescope was used to measure the light reflected from the planet, light first enters the spectrograph through a camera lens, and it splits into a frequency spectrum.

Taylor Bell, lead author of the paper and a Master’s student in astronomy at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, said “the results were surprising the measured albedo of WASP-12b is 0.064 at most. This is an extremely low value, making the planet darker than fresh asphalt!”. The planet is two times less reflective than the moon which has an albedo of 0.12.

The WASP-12b was discovered in 2008 since its discovery it’s one of the most studied exoplanets and has a range of strange properties. The scientists also discovered that it orbits its parent’s star WASP-12a, its size is similar to our sun, and its 44 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun.

Many scientists call it a “hot Jupiter” because it has a strong tidal force that heats its surface up to 2,600°C (4,712°F). There are many other planets that are black but they are cooler than WASP-12b, those planets are hot because of the clouds and alkali metals that absorb the heat and the light. But there is nothing can be said for the WASP-12b, there is no such thing on that planet.

Bell said “on WASP-12b the molecules absorb the energy and are ionized; hydrogen molecules split up into atomic hydrogen in its atmosphere, leading to a low albedo. The fact that the first two exoplanets with measured spectral albedo exhibit significant differences demonstrate the importance of these types of spectral observations, and highlights the great diversity among hot Jupiters”.

Well, it can be said that there are a lot of mysterious things in the universe, and scientists are trying to find every possible breakthrough in the universe.    

Content by: Tohid Sheikh.

   

    

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