Coal-Black, It Reflects Almost No Light
Andrew Fazekas
for National Geographic News
Published August 12, 2011
It may be hard to imagine
a planet blacker than coal, but that's what astronomers say they've discovered in our home galaxy with NASA's Kepler space telescope.
Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant planet, dubbed TrES-2b, is heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius). Yet the apparently inky world appears
to reflect almost none of the starlight that shines on it, according to a new study.
"Being less reflective than coal
or even the blackest acrylic paint—this makes it by far the darkest planet ever discovered," lead study author David Kipping said.
"If we could see it up close
it would look like a near-black ball of gas, with a slight glowing red tinge to it—a true exotic amongst exoplanets," added Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Read more here:
http://tinyurl.com/4xc3s3r