It’s Halloween month and each of us is preparing our best to scare each other because as Brackett, from the Halloween series, rightly said, “It’s Halloween; everyone’s entitled to one good scare.”
However, Nasa has taken this to an extraordinary level. In a series of tweets from Nasa Exoplanets account and also in a webpage particularly dedicated to this, the US space agency has decided to terrify people with the horrifying characteristics of exoplanets.
“It’s scary season, and time to celebrate exoplanets, where every day is Halloween!” Nasa Exoplanets tweeted.
A planet outside of our solar system that is orbiting another star is known as an exoplanet. The galaxy has more planets than stars, as demonstrated by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.
The frightful galaxy
The Twitter handle describes ‘HD 209458 b,’ a gas giant discovered in 1999, as the Space Skeleton. It further symbolizes the planet with monster having its flesh robbed from its bones.
A gas giant exoplanet HD 209458 b revolves around an F-type star. It has a mass of 0.73 Jupiter’s, completes one orbit of its star in 3.5 days, and is 0.04707 AU away.
Sharing an infrared image from Nasa’s Spitzer that looks like a snake, the agency tweeted, “the sinuous object is actually the core of a thick, sooty cloud large enough to swallow dozens of solar systems.”
The Spitzer Space Telescope was the last mission in NASA’s Great Observatories Program. It detected infrared radiation, primarily heat radiation.
Nasa next showed a ‘ home for Frankenstein’s monster,’ a planet with Neptune-like sky. “Lightning cracks against the maelstrom of HAT-P-11b’s sky, giving any monster who needs it a charge,” it tweeted.
Neptune-like exoplanet HAT-P-11 b revolves around a K-type star. It has a mass of 26.69772 Earths, completes one orbit around its star in 4.9 days, and is 0.05254 AU away. Its discovery was announced in 2008.
Winds on HD 189733 b can reach 5,400 mph (2 km/s). On this exoplanet, getting caught in the rain would cause death by different wounds, the tweet reads.
To the human eye, this far-off planet looks vivid blue. But, according to Nasa, any space traveller confusing it with the friendly skies of Earth would be badly mistaken as it comes from a hazy, blow-torched atmosphere incorporating high clouds laced with silicate particles.
