From the ‘being grateful for small mercies department, and from this website, here is extrasolar planet HD 209458b (also unofficially known as “Osiris”, which orbits a star in the constellation of Pegasus) revealed the strongest ever spectroscopic signature for a giant extrasolar planet, indicating Osiris is producing a huge cloud of gas. This gas is being lost from the planet’s atmosphere; Osiris is evaporating
I guess we can look forward to this as the sun swells and slowly fries us. That is if that’s what it’s going to do.
And speaking of it heating up, over the fold . . . is the vehicle someone is hoping might be able to get around Venus to give us a detailed idea of what’s going on under those clouds. It’s not a very plausible mock up of what Venus’s surface might look like (in my wholly ignorant opinion) but it’s a cool little vehicle.
I was at the Parkes radio telescope on Sunday as part of a short holiday. It is a way cool piece of hardware.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkes_Observatory
Trivia: The energy collected by the Parkes radio telescope over the course of an entire year would light a 100 Watt lightbulb for less than 100 billionths of a second.
Nicholas – looks like a pretty good representation of Venus’ surface to me – at least going by the images various probes have sent back. Check out:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2006/vesper_prt.htm
No, the really iffiness about that images is the blueness of the sky. And the highly unlikely use of what looks like solar cells to power the craft. No under those clouds, I think. And certainly not in that atmosphere …
The surface of Venus look accurate but not the sky. According to the ‘Internet Encyclopedia of Science‘ “Venus has a dense atmosphere, composed chiefly of carbon dioxide, which generates a surface pressure 90 times greater than that on Earth. This massive blanket of carbon dioxide is also responsible for a runaway greenhouse effect that heats the planet’s surface to an average temperature of 467