Although this is a first confirmed, warm Neptunes may be more common than expected
Perhaps I should be embarrassed, but this is also the first I’ve heard of “warm Neptunes”. The article below does a very good job of describing what they are and why they look and act like a comet, but are really planets. Space.com goes into even more detail on warm Neptunes in a related article (also linked to below) and I could spend hours just reading about these.
What was even more surprising was that Kepler and several other missions are actually expected to find many more. Perhaps a better way to say that is, they are expected to confirm what scientists have been theorizing up to this point.
But that’s what science is all about – testing theories, building on those proven correct, going back to the drawing board for those that haven’t been (yet)!
This article, and several of the related articles linked in it are well worth the read …
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A Neptune-size planet appears to be masquerading as a comet, with a gargantuan stream of gas flowing behind it like a comet’s tail.
The bizarre find is the first of its kind ever discovered by astronomers. The strange, cometlike planet, known as GJ 436b, is orbiting a red dwarf star and is about 22 times as massive as Earth. Astronomers detected the giant gas cloud around the planet using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory.
…… GJ 436b, located about 33 light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo, is a kind of world known as a warm Neptune. Such planets, at about 10 to 20 times the mass of Earth, are about the mass of “cold Neptunes” such as Uranus — and, naturally, Neptune — but they are as close, or closer, to their stars than Mercury is to our sun.
Although prior research has predicted that other gas giants should be blowing off cometlike tails, based on how hot they must be due to their proximity to their stars, “GJ 436b is the first planet for which a cometlike tail is confidently detected,” Ehrenreich said.
…… The scientists estimated that GJ 436b is currently blowing off up to 1,000 tons of gas per second. This means that GJ 436b is currently losing about 0.1 percent of its atmosphere every billion years, which is far too slow a rate to deplete its atmosphere in the lifetime of its parent red dwarf star.
…… Ehrenreich noted that the Kepler spacecraft, as well as NASA’s upcoming TESS space mission and the European Space Agency’s future CHEOPS and PLATO spacecraft “are poised to find thousands of system like GJ 436 in the coming years.” This suggests that many other planets with cometlike tails could soon be discovered.
The scientists detailed their findings online today (June 24) in the journal Nature.
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Written by Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor | June 24, 2015 01:29pm ET