The exoplanet from hell: Cloudy, with a chance of molten iron rain

Astronomers could use new technique to study weather on more Earth-like worlds.

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[JohnDeL]

Lost Creation[/url]"gztzrxi]How many rogue planets have we found? Wikipedia lists 8, but that list doesn't include PSO JS18.5-22, and all of them were news to me.

Also, isn't referring to PSO J318.5-22 as an "Exoplanet" in the headline technically incorrect? I've only the Wikipedia definition to go by, but it certainly reads like rogue and exoplanet are mutually exclusive classifications. (Which would explain some of the confusion earlier in the thread.)

Planetologists are a bit lackadaisical about that. An exoplanet just has to be a planet that doesn't belong to our Solar System. Rogue planets are planets that either formed in interstellar space or were ejected from a solar system (which happens a lot more often than you might think). So rogue planets are a subcategory of exoplanets for a lot of planetologists.

As to the question of where the heat for this planet comes from, most of it is almost certainly from the formation of the planet, what we call gravitational binding energy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitati ... ing_energy ). Remember that when an Earth-sized body forms, the gravitational energy of its collapse (which is lost as heat) is roughly equivalent to two weeks of our Sun's output! That's why planetologists always giggle when Alderaan gets blown up; it just couldn't happen.

 

[JohnDeL]

brionl[/url]":39g6pgvp]
Anyway if *I* was going to blow up a planet, I'd open a hyper-spatial tube to a parallel dimension where all objects have an intrinsic velocity of 5 times the speed of light.

That's a Ploor excuse for a planet-killer.