Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Planet blasted by stars

I have read that new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope suggest that high-energy radiation is evaporating about 5 million tons of matter from the planet every second! I feel that this is very interesting because that is a lot of matter evaporated from that planet! The planet, known as CoRoT-2b, has a mass about 3 times that of Jupiter (1000 times that of Earth) and orbits its parent star, CoRoT-2a at a distance roughly ten times the distance between Earth and the Moon. If it wasn't for the planet, this star might have left behind the volatility of its youth millions of years ago. This is really cool. Imagine if a planet in our solar system is being fried like what is happening to CoRoT-2b. the heat would be excruciating and neighboring planets will also be affected one way or another. I am fascinated by this article. 

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