Okay Space Cadets, lets put this one if the “Weirdness in Space” file. Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Princeton University have announced that they have found an exoplanet reflects less than 1% of the light that falls on it.
That is damned dark. How dark you ask? Well, it is darker than coal, it is darker than black paint. It is so dark that it might qualify as that color all the Goth’s are waiting to trade up from black too.
The planet is a Jupiter sized body orbiting a start about 750 light years away. It is very close to its primary, only orbiting 3.1 million miles away from the star.
What makes it so dark? We really don’t know, but part of it has to be the temperatures of the gas giant. The surface temperature is estimated to be around 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit.
That is a good clue as to what makes this such a dark body. It is way, way to hot for the reflective clouds of ammonia that make Jupiter a naked-eye visible object here on the earth.
In fact the temperature of the planet is probably due in part to its dark coloring. The amount of light falling on this planet is huge and it is absorbing rather than reflecting most of it. That means it is changing it into heat and hanging on to that heat.
Here is what one of the Astronomers had to say about it:
“It’s not clear what is responsible for making this planet so extraordinarily dark,” stated co-author David Spiegel of Princeton University. “However, it’s not completely pitch black. It’s so hot that it emits a faint red glow, much like a burning ember or the coils on an electric stove.”
Thus far, finding a planet this dark is a very rare occurrence. Though, given the fact that we have only found 2,000 or so exosolar planets, who knows? Maybe there are billions and billions of these dark objects orbiting close to their stars with odd atmospheres that make them nearly as dark as interstellar space.
We only found this one because we had the Kepler Observatory out there looking for planets orbiting close to their primaries. If it were not for the fact that the star the dark planet orbits would wax and wane in brightness, there is no chance we’d have picked up on it.
As it is it took 5 years of analyzing the data for us to figure out that there was not enough reflected light and measure the albedo of a planet whose barely reflected light takes ¾ of a millennium to arrive.
Dad always said that technology equaled a wonderful time to be alive. I think that he had it exactly right. Without our technology we would never know about the strange and wonderful things in our galaxy, like this dark planet.
So, what is on your minds tonight Kossacks? The floor is yours.