HD 80606b tagged posts

Astronomers provide ‘Field Guide’ to Exoplanets known as Hot Jupiters

The turbulent atmosphere of a hot, gaseous planet known as HD 80606b is shown in this simulation based on data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The planet spends most of its time far away from its star, but every 111 days, it swings extremely close to the star, experiencing a massive burst of heat. NASA/JPL-CalTech

Hot Jupiters — giant gas planets that race around their host stars in extremely tight orbits — have become a little bit less mysterious thanks to a new study combining theoretical modeling with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.

While previous studies mostly focused on individual worlds classified as “hot Jupiters” due to their superficial similarity to the gas giant in our own solar system, the new study is the first to look at a broader population of the st...

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