Bizarre Gas Giant Planet with Wildly Eccentric Orbit Like-Comet and Extreme Temperature Swings
The planet has wild variations in its weather as it orbits its parent star.
The gas giant planet heats up 555 °C (1,000 °F) in just a matter of hours triggering "shock wave storms" with winds that move faster than the speed of sound, at 3 miles per second.
HD 80606 b is an eccentric and hot Jupiter 190 light-years from the Sun in the constellation of Ursa Major.
HD 80606 b was discovered orbiting the star Struve 1341 B in April 2001 by a team led by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz.
HD 80606 b has the most eccentric orbit of any known planet after HD 20782 b. Its eccentricity is 0.9336, comparable to Halley's Comet.
With a mass 4 times that of Jupiter, it is a gas giant. Because the planet transits the host star its radius can be determined using the transit method and was found to be slightly smaller than Jupiter's. Its density is slightly less than Earth's.
It has a wildly eccentric orbit almost like a comet.. It goes very close to its star and then back out very far away from it over and over every 111 days.
As a result of this high eccentricity, the planet's distance from its star varies from 0.03 to 0.88 AU.
At apastron it would receive an insolation similar to that of Earth, while at periastron the insolation would be around 800 times greater, far more than that experienced by Mercury in the Solar System.
In 2009, the eclipse of HD 80606 b by its parent star was detected, allowing measurements of the planet's temperature to be made as the planet passed through periastron.
These measurements indicated that the temperature rose from around 800 K (500 °C / 1000 °F) to 1500 K (1200 °C / 2200 °F) in just 6 hours. An observer above the cloud tops of the gas giant would see the parent star swell to 30 times the apparent size of the Sun in our own sky.
HD 80606 b
Clip, images credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCSC
