Oddball Planets and Formations

I wanted to look at some galactic eye opening processes this week, mostly because I've been interested in the formation and deformation of planets and solar systems.

The first thing we're going to talk about is the occurrence of planets that do not orbit their parent stars in the same direction. It`s a common idea for scientists to think that planets in a solar system would match the clockwise/counter-clockwise rotation of their parent stars. However, while searching for extrasolar terrestrial planets (thanks SETI!) we've discovered a new type of rule breaking planet lovingly referred to as "Hot Jupiter".

Hot Jupiters are enormous Jupiter sized (and larger) gas giants with extremely close orbits to their parent stars. To put it into perspective, many of these Hot Jupiter's orbit their parent start 3x closer than Mercury does to our Sun. The odd part about roughly 1/4 of these Hot Jupiters however, is the fact that they sometimes have highly elliptical and counter-rotational orbits to their parent stars.

There's tons of anomalies in space however and here's a few that might interest you!

CoRoT-7b

This was one of the first extrasolar planets to be found, and was originally the smallest planet we had ever seen. However, what I found most interesting about this planet is the fact that on the side we have seen of it (closest to it's star) the temperature can range from 1800-2600 celcius. This means lakes of lava, pressurized steam everywhere, oh and did I mention the possibility that it might rain rocks there?

TrES-4

TrES-4 is the largest planet we have ever seen in the universe. It's roughly 1.6-1.7 times the size of our Jupiter and extremely puffy for it's size. It shouldn't even be able to come to fruition but it has and does today, orbiting it's parent star TrES in just under 4 days.

TrES-2b

In the same system as TrES-4, TrES-2b is the darkest planet we have ever discovered. Once again this type of planet is called a Hot Jupiter and is massive in size. However, this planet reflects less visible light than coal or black paint!

Planet Diamond

Last but certainly not the least, we have a very very special planet. It gives a whole new meaning to precious metals actually. This little planet with no name orbits the pulsar PSR J1719-1438, but what is spectacular about the planet itself is that it is now pure diamond! What most likely happened here, is that carbon expelled from when the host star went supernova gathered in a small accretion disk and eventually due to HUGE pressures (and after millions of years of gathering) was turned to diamond!

Well that's it for this week and I hope you're exploring a little more into the universe!