Horrifying ‘roasted planet’ has ‘torture’ event every 111 days where Nasa says ‘nightmare alien world boils to 1,100C’
AN alien world "suffers star-grazing torture" every 111 days as its fiery sun boils the planet to a hellish 1,093C.
This brutal event has led to Nasa branding it "the roasted planet", as the space agency revealed the horrifying conditions on distant HD 80606 b.
The planet is hefty at more than four times as massive as Jupiter, and around 1.07 times as wide.
A single year on the planet lasts 111.4 days as it whirls around its host star.
But due to its extreme elliptical orbit, the planet swings extremely close to its sun on a massive oval-shaped journey – before whizzing off into the distance again.
Nasa says that this "torturous journey boils its atmosphere" every single time it swings past.
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This roasts both the light and dark sides of the planet, and causes what Nasa describes as "howling, supersonic winds and shockwave storms".
Nasa added that the planet "will never escape this scorching nightmare".
Due to the bizarre orbit, HD 80606 b gets as close as 2.7 million miles to its star – or 81.8 million away.
For contrast, Earth sits at a balmy 93 million miles from our own sun.
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At its closest point, the star would seem 30 times as big as our Sun if viewed from the cloud-tops of the scorched alien planet.
Unsurprisingly, HD 80606 b is described as a hot Jupiter due to its roasting temperatures.
It heats up by over 500C in a matter of hours, scientists believe.
And the storms that ripple across the planet have winds with speeds of up to 11,000mph.
The planet, which sits around 217 lightyears from our own Sun, was first discovered in April 2001.
It was found orbiting the star HD 80505, after it was spotted in "transit" across the face of its sun.
This journey across the star's face takes around 12.1 hours.
It's a common way to discover exoplanets, which are alien worlds outside of our own solar system.
Exoplanets are usually too small and dark to see on their own – but they can be captured as dark spots moving across the faces of their bright host stars.
Due to its terrifying conditions, the planet was featured in Nasa's "Galaxy of Horrors" series.
EXOPLANETS – EXPLAINED!
Here's what you need to know...
- An exoplanet is a planet that is located outside of our Solar System and one that is orbiting its own star, as Earth orbits the Sun
- They are very hard to see with telescopes because they are often hidden by the brightness of their star
- Nasa sent the Kepler space telescope into orbit with the purpose of finding Earth-sized exoplanets that might support life
- More than 5,500 exoplanets have been discovered so far and more missions to find even more exoplanets are planned
- A good way to spot an exoplanet is to look for "wobbly" stars because a disruption to starlight can indicate that a planet is orbiting it and blocking its light intermittently
- Expoplanets are very common in the universe and the more we find that look like Earth, the closer we get to knowing whether Earth is the only life-bearing planet
Picture Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The US space agency created a movie poster in the style of classic horror movies, and gave it the tagline: "Can you hear this exoplanet screaming?".
Its host star is located in the constellation of Ursa Major, a constellation in the northern sky as seen from the Northern Hemisphere.
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Another terrifying world is the deadly alien planet with 5,400mph winds where it rains glass.
And then there's the 6,800C planet that's "hotter than the Sun" – and Nasa said it "could be another circle of hell".
