Egg-Shaped Exoplanet Is Extremely Hot and Pitch Black

An artist's impression of exoplanet WASP-12b. Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI).



Joel Kontinen

If you think that Earth is just an ordinary planet, you might probably want to think again.

Many exoplanets are weird. HD 131399 orbits in a system with three suns. HATS-14b is so strange that it has practically killed current planet-formation theories.

And then there are the hot ones. Some exoplanets are hot. Some are even hotter.

The temperate on the hot Jupiter WASP-12b 2600 is degrees Celsius. And that is not its only weird feature.

WASP-12b is egg-shaped and has a year slightly longer than one Earth day. It orbits it star some 1,400 light years from us. With almost no albedo, it hardly reflects any light and is in effect pitch black.

As far as we know, there is only one planet that is perfectly suited for life – the one we call home.

ESA/Hubble Information Centre. 2017. Hubble observes pitch black planet. Science Daily. (14 September).

Explaining Away the Unique Earth by Invoking a Roving Jupiter

A new study speculates that Jupiter might have played a major role in the early solar system. Image courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.



Joel Kontinen

Astronomers used to assume that our solar system was by no means special. However, with the discovery of countless exosolar systems, they have to acknowledge that ours is no humdrum system.

There’s no place like home.

For those who rely on solely naturalistic explanations, the uniqueness of the solar system has to be explained away. A recent paper in PNAS attempts to do this:

“The Solar System is an unusual member of the galactic planetary census in that it lacks planets that reside in close proximity to the Sun. In this work, we propose that the primordial nebula-driven process responsible for retention of Jupiter and Saturn at large orbital radii and sculpting Mars’ low mass is also responsible for clearing out the Solar System’s innermost region. Cumulatively, our results place the Solar System and the mechanisms that shaped its unique orbital architecture into a broader, extrasolar context.”

In their paper, Konstantin Batygin at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and Greg Laughlin at the University of California, Santa Cruz, propose that Jupiter first wandered near the Sun, driving away the assumed big gaseous planets and thus making room for the inner planets.

It was then rescued by Saturn from drifting away into space.

This sounds more like storytelling than science. There is not the slightest bit of evidence that Jupiter ever came that close to the Sun or that hot gas planets existed in “the Solar System’s innermost region”.

It seems that the main purpose of this paper is to show that Earth and our solar system are not special.

The evidence points to a very different conclusion, however, as Privileged Species, a newly released video from Discovery Institute featuring biologist Michael Denton, shows:





Source:

Batygin, Konstantin & Greg Laughlin. 2015. Jupiter’s decisive role in the inner Solar System’s early evolution. PNAS (March 23).

New Scientist: There’s No Place Like Home Elsewhere in the Universe

No other planet like this has been discovered. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

"Our system is a rarity, there's no longer a question about that”, says Geoffrey W. Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley, in this week’s issue of New Scientist.

In the magazine Lee Billings gives an overview of the search for alien worlds. ”Two decades of searching have failed to turn up another planetary system like ours. Should we be worried?” New Scientist asks.

Professor Marcy has discovered more exoplanets or planets outside our solar system than any other astronomer.

Exoplanets have turned out to be extremely weird worlds. They do not conform to the predictions of naturalistic planet origins theories. In 1755 Immanuel Kant speculated that the Sun was formed when a huge gas and dust cloud collapsed. The gas and debris that it ejected coalesced into planets. Later Pierre-Simon Laplace developed this nebular hypothesis into a more credible form.

Exoplanets basically falsify such views. In many cases, giant gas planets almost touch their suns and do not leave any room for Earth-sized planets, or then smaller planets orbit so close together that even in theory, life as we know it is impossible.

However, there’s one place that feels like home. Genesis tells us that God created Earth to be habitable.


Source:

Billings, Lee. 2010. No place like home: Our lonesome solar system. New Scientist 2812: 46-49.

Earth Is Just The Right Size For Life

New Scientist reports that Earth is just the right size for sustaining life. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

The discovery of huge exoplanets has given rise to the hope that they might harbour life. However, recently New Scientist suggested that this might well be wishful thinking.

Super earths or large rocky planets with a mass five to ten times that of Earth might simply be too huge to sustain life.

On 15 September, Vlada Stamenkovic of the German Aerospace Center (Deutschen Zentrums für Luft- und Raumfahrt) and colleagues will present a paper at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany, in which they will describe the results of their research on the basic prerequisites for sustaining life.

They discovered that rocky planets should approximately be the size of Earth in order to support plate tectonics and have a magnetic field.

According to Stamenkovic, plate tectonics will probably not work on too huge planets such as super earths. What is needed for supporting plate tectonics is a planet with a mass of approximately 0.5 to 2.5 times that of Earth. And a magnetic field is needed for shielding the planet from cosmic radiation.

This has led Stamenkovic to believe that Earth is special.

Not all astrobiologists will agree with him. Some still hope that life is lurking somewhere in outer space.

The research of Stamenkovic and colleagues nevertheless supports that what Bible-believing scientists have known for a long time: Earth is a privileged planet, designed for sustaining life. As the Apollo 8 astronauts put it in their 1968 Christmas message: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

Source:

Shiga, David. 2009. Earth-sized planets are just right for life. New Scientist 2724 (2 September). http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327243.600-earthsized-planets-are-just-right-for-life.html