Quite a few of the planets we ’ve found outside our Solar System arehot Jupiters , expectant worlds that orb super penny-pinching to their star . Now scientists describe the find of a peculiarly bizarre such satellite .
Called CoRoT-2b , the major planet is located 930 light-colored - years from Earth . It takes just 1.7 Earth days to revolve its legion star , orbiting so close ( more than 10 clip closer than Mercury does our Sun ) that one side of the planet is credibly tidally locked to the star – that means , due to the vivid soberness , one side always present it like the Moon does our major planet .
So far we ’ve meditate the temperatures of nine similar planets , and found that the hottest part on all of them was at the compass point nearest to their hotshot , or somewhat to the E , as the impregnable idle words near the equator would be blowing eastward and displace the hot spot .
CoRoT-2b is unusual , though , because researchers lead by McGill University in Montreal , Canada found that the hot spot on this major planet is actually west of its center , using data from NASA ’s Spitzer Space Telescope . This may suggest the planet has air current traveling in the opposite direction , which itself poses a number of new interrogative sentence .
“ Nature has thrown us a curveball , ” Nicolas Cowan , a co - author on the field of study , said in astatement . “ On this major planet , the wind swash the wrong way . ”
In their paper inNature Astronomy , the squad advise a number of ideas for the uncanny planet . It might be that the planet is spinning so tardily that it rotates slower than it orbits , which would allow its air current to travel backward , like Venus in our Solar System .
However , this would upend some of our ideas about hot Jupiters , namely that planets in such tight cranial orbit should be tidally lock . If this one is rotating slower than it orbit , this means it is n’t lock .
Another idea is that the satellite ’s magnetized field is interacting with its atmosphere and causing the change in wind , which could give us a rare fortune to study an exoplanet ’s magnetic field of operation . Or it could be that large clouds are spread over the satellite and obscuring our view more or less , although this would n’t fit in with our ideas on how atmospheres circulate on other world .
There ’s definitely something odd going on here . While we do n’t know for sure yet , CoRoT-2b spotlight how weird and wonderful the universe of discourse can be .
“ The westward offset of CoRoT-2b is another example that red-hot Jupiters are not all the same , ” the researchers write .
“ More broadly , each scenario outlined above challenges our intellect of inadequate - flow planets . ”
