Planetary science: Extrasolar planet mirror ball
An extrasolar 'hot Jupiter' planet may act like a giant mirror ball, re-radiating almost all of its incident energy back out to space, suggests a paper. But a second paper, tells a very different story, making 'hot Jupiters' seem all the more intriguing and complex.
'Hot Jupiters' are extrasolar planets whose mass is similar to that of Jupiter, but which orbit much closer to their parent star. Joseph Harrington and colleagues studied one such planet and found that it acts almost as a mirror, a bizarre observation as one would expect the planet to absorb at least some heat.
But Heather A. Knutson and co-workers found that a different 'hot Jupiter' can redistribute heat around its surface. The team effectively crudely 'mapped' the temperature distribution across the planet. Their data suggest that energy absorbed by the dayside of the planet can be fairly efficiently redistributed throughout the planet's atmosphere.
CONTACT
Joseph Harrington (University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA) Author paper [2]
Tel: +1 407 823 3416; E-mail: jharring@phsyics.ucf.edu
Heather A. Knutson (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA) Author paper [3]
Tel: +1 617 223 1723; E-mail: hknutson@cfa.harvard.edu

Adam Burrows (University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 520 621 1795; E-mail: aburrows@as.arizona.edu