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WASP-12b
WASP-12b is a hot Jupiter (a class of extrasolar planets) orbiting the star WASP-12, discovered in April of 2008, by the SuperWASP planetary transit survey. The planet takes only a little over one Earth day to orbit its star, in contrast to about 365.25 days for the Earth to orbit the Sun. Its distance from the star (approximately 3.5 million kilometers [2.2 million miles; 0.023 astronomical units]) is only the Earth's distance from the Sun, with an eccentricity the same as Jupiter's. Consequently, it has one of the lowest densities for exoplanets ("inflated" by the flux of energy from the star). On December 3, 2013, scientists working with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) reported detecting water in the atmosphere of the exoplanet. In July 2014, NASA announced finding very dry atmospheres on three exoplanets (HD 189733b, HD 209458b, WASP-12b) orbiting sun-like stars.
In September 2017, researchers working on the HST announced that WASP-12b reflects just 6% of the light that shines on its surface. As a result, its reflectivity has been described as "black as asphalt" and as "pitch black", although it is so hot that it emits a reddish glow.
Since hot Jupiter exoplanets are tidally locked, one side is in permanent day while the other side is in permanent night, just as the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth. This is thought to induce a large flow of heat from the highly irradiated day side to the cooler night side, resulting in strong winds rushing around the planet's atmosphere.
Taylor Bell and Nicolas Cowan have pointed out that hydrogen will tend to be ionised on the day side. After flowing to the cooler face in a wind, it will then tend to recombine into neutral atoms, and thus will enhance the transport of heat.
The planet is so close to its star that its tidal forces are distorting it into a prolate spheroid and pulling away its atmosphere at a rate of about 10−7 MJ (about 189 quadrillion tons) per year (6 billion tons per second). The so-called "tidal heating", and the proximity of the planet to its star, combine to bring the surface temperature to more than 2,500 K (2,200 °C).
On May 20, 2010, the Hubble Space Telescope spotted WASP-12b being "consumed" by its star. Scientists had been aware that stars could consume planets; however, this was the first time such an event had been observed so clearly. It has been estimated that the planet has between 3 and 10 million years left of its life.
The Hubble Space Telescope observed the planet by using its Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The observations have confirmed predictions published in Nature in February 2009 by Peking University's Shu-lin Li. The planet's atmosphere has ballooned to be nearly three times the radius of Jupiter, while the planet itself has 40% more mass than Jupiter.
A study in 2012, utilizing the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect, determined that WASP-12b's orbit is strongly misaligned with the equatorial plane of its star by 59+15
−20°.
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WASP-12b AI simulator
(@WASP-12b_simulator)
WASP-12b
WASP-12b is a hot Jupiter (a class of extrasolar planets) orbiting the star WASP-12, discovered in April of 2008, by the SuperWASP planetary transit survey. The planet takes only a little over one Earth day to orbit its star, in contrast to about 365.25 days for the Earth to orbit the Sun. Its distance from the star (approximately 3.5 million kilometers [2.2 million miles; 0.023 astronomical units]) is only the Earth's distance from the Sun, with an eccentricity the same as Jupiter's. Consequently, it has one of the lowest densities for exoplanets ("inflated" by the flux of energy from the star). On December 3, 2013, scientists working with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) reported detecting water in the atmosphere of the exoplanet. In July 2014, NASA announced finding very dry atmospheres on three exoplanets (HD 189733b, HD 209458b, WASP-12b) orbiting sun-like stars.
In September 2017, researchers working on the HST announced that WASP-12b reflects just 6% of the light that shines on its surface. As a result, its reflectivity has been described as "black as asphalt" and as "pitch black", although it is so hot that it emits a reddish glow.
Since hot Jupiter exoplanets are tidally locked, one side is in permanent day while the other side is in permanent night, just as the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth. This is thought to induce a large flow of heat from the highly irradiated day side to the cooler night side, resulting in strong winds rushing around the planet's atmosphere.
Taylor Bell and Nicolas Cowan have pointed out that hydrogen will tend to be ionised on the day side. After flowing to the cooler face in a wind, it will then tend to recombine into neutral atoms, and thus will enhance the transport of heat.
The planet is so close to its star that its tidal forces are distorting it into a prolate spheroid and pulling away its atmosphere at a rate of about 10−7 MJ (about 189 quadrillion tons) per year (6 billion tons per second). The so-called "tidal heating", and the proximity of the planet to its star, combine to bring the surface temperature to more than 2,500 K (2,200 °C).
On May 20, 2010, the Hubble Space Telescope spotted WASP-12b being "consumed" by its star. Scientists had been aware that stars could consume planets; however, this was the first time such an event had been observed so clearly. It has been estimated that the planet has between 3 and 10 million years left of its life.
The Hubble Space Telescope observed the planet by using its Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The observations have confirmed predictions published in Nature in February 2009 by Peking University's Shu-lin Li. The planet's atmosphere has ballooned to be nearly three times the radius of Jupiter, while the planet itself has 40% more mass than Jupiter.
A study in 2012, utilizing the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect, determined that WASP-12b's orbit is strongly misaligned with the equatorial plane of its star by 59+15
−20°.
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