Paper on which the article is based: <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae157c" rel="nofollow">https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae157c</a><p>"A Carbon-rich Atmosphere on a Windy Pulsar Planet", PSR J2322–2650b.<p>No one bothered to link to it, but fortunately Google picked it up.
Coming up around 2041 (hopefully) will be the <a href="https://habitableworldsobservatory.org" rel="nofollow">https://habitableworldsobservatory.org</a> - which will be the first telescope sensitive enough to detect Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars! Check out the "Simulated Observation of the Solar System" video toward the bottom of that page, coolest thing I've seen in a while!
Kyplanet had a video on this.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7pu0Dhu87o" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7pu0Dhu87o</a>
“Stripped stellar core” is a crazy concept I could never come up with on my own. A literal diamond in the sky.
Great video!<p>What a weird setup.<p>I love all of this crazy stuff we've been finding recently. And not that this planet could support it, but I also love what this unexpected diversity in planetary bodies means for the possibility of weird and unpredictable formulas for life.<p>I hope we keep finding crazy stuff like this. I hope it accelerates. I hope we find life soon. I need it.
Pretty cool, or more probable hot. Though I highly doubt it is something resembling a planet up close, it is more likely some kind of remnant from forming the neutron star that just happened to have the right size and ended up in the right orbit to show up in exoplanet surveys.
What the HeC?
The artist's conception, with Jupiter-like bands running at an angle through the principle tidal axis really bugs me. If there's some bizarre mechanism that makes this even remotely plausible, it ought to have been explained. If (as I think is more likely) it's just a case of someone who didn't understand the article commissioning and approving and illustration by someone else who didn't understand it... why? Why even bother? It would be clearer with no illustration than with a misleading picture.<p>(The worst example of this I've seen was a few years back, when CNN briefly used a picture of a cow to "illustrate" an article about coconut milk).
What angle? The cloud bands are running at right angles to the terminator and roughly parallel to the axis of tidal stretching. Are you looking at "Image B"? That one might look a like tricky, but it's just because you're looking a bit upwards at one of the poles, so you can see the curvature of the cloud bands around the planet.<p>Now, would clouds around such a weird planet take such a familiar shape? I doubt it. But going with that familiar shape is probably better then making up something weird to happen at the stretched ends.
Right, that's what I'm objecting to. With tidal forces that strong, there should be no rotation parallel to the axis of tidal stretching. In the two-body reference frame the axis of rotation should be identical to the axis of rotation (tidal locking). So it should keep one pole towards the star.<p>The terminator is only secondarily significant here, but since it lies in a plane perpendicular to this axis, any bands should be parallel to it. But since this means that there will be a "hot side" and a "cold side" and convective cells between these will probably eliminate any banding.
Well, if it's tidally locked (which it probably is and the paper doesn't disabuse me), then both its rotation and orbit are about 8 hours on the sameish axis. So it's still spinning pretty dang fast, enough that the gas doesn't have to settle into hot and cold sides. I can't fully parse the part of the paper where they talk about the wind structure, but they do seem to think it still has some banding. Section 5: <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae157c" rel="nofollow">https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae157c</a> (linked elsewhere, here again for convenience).
> both its rotation and orbit are about 8 hours on the sameish axis. So<p>> it's still spinning pretty dang fast, enough that the gas doesn't have<p>> to settle into hot and cold sides.<p>Except that by spinning on the same axis [more correctly, on axes normal to the same plane] at the same rate the atmosphere is stationary in the co-rotating frame. That's what it means to be tidally locked. The gas is already divided into a hot side (always facing the star) and a cold side (always facing away).
I wonder if there are bucky balls full of helium hanging out under pressure in there?
I found this similar idea done in a lab: <a href="https://cen.acs.org/articles/83/i3/Filling-Fullerene.html" rel="nofollow">https://cen.acs.org/articles/83/i3/Filling-Fullerene.html</a><p>They use H2 instead of He. Is that good enough?
Two side remarks:<p>* It's probably too hot there (2000K in the cold part) for fullerene. The atmosphere there is mostly C2, C3 and CO. (CO is mentioned in the paper as a very good guess, but not mentioned in the press release.)<p>* If you fill a fullerene with H2 or He, it will float less instead of more.
Indeed, unimaginable what is possible! There will also be traces of H, N, O, S etc due to comets crashing in, so room for carbon chemistry once temperature permits.
If I'm standing near (but not directly on) the pointy part of the lemon shaped planet, do I feel like I'm standing on level ground, or am I on a slant?
The surface shape of the planet is pretty much defined by what feels gravitationally flat at that point, so it would feel flat. If it wasn't flat, the gas would flow "downhill" until it did. (Oh, yeah, by the way, gas, so you're not going to be "standing" per se.)
Makes sense, thanks. I guess it would only feel like a slant if the "force" causing the odd shape, the gravity of the pulsar, was removed. Then all the extended gas would fall back towards the center, while a solid planet might be able to maintain its odd shape. Then that pointy end would be like a giant mountain, in terms of how it would feel to be on.<p>Now I'm wondering if the planet is tidally locked, otherwise the forces on the extended and retracted bits of the lemon would shift widely as the planet rotates. Actually we could then model the extended bit as a giant tidal wave, er, tidal cloud. What a world.
The "solid" planet actually wouldn't keep its shape either. :D Part of the definition of a planet is being in "hydrostatic equilibrium". Even rock is basically a liquid at the scale of, say, Ceres. But yeah, you've got the idea.
The aliens living there have silly high pitch voices.
You should hear what the clowns on Sol-3 sound like.
Same with Canada, at least according to Pavement.
They are also rich, it is diamonds everywhere.
Getting flung around a gamma ray emitting pulsar while baking on diamonds doesn't seem very groovy
There are chemiseries and metabolisms out there beyond our wildest imaginations