Saturday, May 12, 2012

Weirdest Planets

Posted by "CavalierZee"


Courtesy Of "National Geographic and YouTube"




With temperatures ranging from 1000 to 2000°C, gravity 15 times stronger than Earth’s, and a year that lasts just 5.6 of our days, HAT-P-2b is not a planet you’d want to visit for vacation.
The unusual gas giant—located 440 light-years away in the constellation Hercules – turns out to be the most massive planet found outside our solar system so far.
Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spotted the superdense planet using the HATNet global network of automated telescopes, which scans a large fraction of the Northern Hemisphere sky every night to search for planets.
HAT-P-2b, the second planet the project has discovered, stunned scientists with far-out features unprecedented for an alien world.
HAt-P-2b is but one of the odd planets in the cosmos. Journey further into space with this documentary, and discover the weirdest planets of our universe.

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