All these discoveries they're making are pretty cool. This planet sounds awesome.Astronomers find distant, fluffy planetThu Sep 14, 7:13 PM ETWASHINGTON - The largest planet ever found orbiting another star is so puffy it would float on water, astronomers said Thursday. The newly discovered planet, dubbed HAT-P-1, is both the largest and least dense of the nearly 200 worlds astronomers have found outside our own solar system.ADVERTISEMENTHAT-P-1 orbits one of a pair of stars in the constellation Lacerta, about 450 light-years from Earth."This new planet, if you could imagine putting it in a cosmic water glass, it would float," said Robert Noyes, a research astrophysicist with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The planet, a gas giant, is probably a puffed up ball of hydrogen and helium.HAT-P-1 is an oddball planet, since it orbits its parent star at just one-twentieth of the distance that separates Earth from our own sun. While Earth takes a year to orbit the sun, the newly found planet whips around its star once every 4.5 days.Astronomers believe HAT-P-1 may belong to an entirely new class of planets, along with a second, smaller distant world that's also puffier than theories would have predicted, Noyes said.Astronomers used a network of telescopes in Arizona and Hawaii to discover the planet. Its parent star is too faint to see with the naked eye but can be spied with binoculars.
Wow, the planet sounds really cool. But it doesn't sound like a planet to me...just some dust or or someting.
Well it's not from our hood, it's in a different galaxy so it doesen't deserve a cool name like Pluto.This is the picture on Yahoo of what it looks like. Not an actual pic obviously, but what they saw.
HAT P-1 is a gay name. I guess the p stands for planet-1. We should pm Noyes to change the name from HAT P-1 to bball-world.net. Does anyone know how far 450 light years is? Maybe in miles
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (coyn3burglar @ Sep 14 2006, 10:41 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>Wow, the planet sounds really cool. But it doesn't sound like a planet to me...just some dust or or someting.</div>Well, it's all gas from what it sounds like. That's not really different from Jupiter or stuff like that. Not all planets are solid like Earth.<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (LAZY @ Sep 14 2006, 10:44 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>HAT P-1 is a gay name. I guess the p stands for planet-1. We should pm Noyes to change the name from HAT P-1 to bball-world.net. Does anyone know how far 450 light years is? Maybe in miles</div>Yeah, I imagine HAT has to do with the solar system it's in, and P-1 is planet like you said. I'm sure it's not an official name, though. At some point, all the astronomy nerds would get together and be like, "THIS PLANET'S NAME SHOULD BE NEBULON 8 OF THE FOURTH RING OF SAURON" or something.Whatever 450 light years times 5,878,482,164,161 miles is... I'm not putting that in my calculator.
900 trillion miles..well, that's justing mulitplying the 5,000,000,000,000 miles, and not the 878,482,164,161. So I imagine it's in the neighborhood of a few quadrillion.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Hang Eleven @ Sep 15 2006, 02:44 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>900 trillion miles..well, that's justing mulitplying the 5,000,000,000,000 miles, and not the 878,482,164,161. So I imagine it's in the neighborhood of a few quadrillion.</div>That's pretty much why I didn't multiply it out... it's not like you can put 900 trillion miles into perspective, at least, any more than saying, "Wow, that's really freaking far away."
