As we come to terms with the latest numbers and updates about everyone’s favourite virus, we can be thankful, at least, that we don’t have this to worry about:
Wasp-76b: The exotic inferno planet where it ‘rains iron’ – BBC News
Wasp-76b, as it’s known, orbits so close in to its host star, its dayside temperatures exceed 2,400C – hot enough to vaporise metals. The planet’s nightside, on the other hand, is 1,000 degrees cooler, allowing those metals to condense and rain out. It’s a bizarre environment, according to Dr David Ehrenreich from the University of Geneva. “Imagine instead of a drizzle of water droplets, you have iron droplets splashing down,” he told BBC News.ESO telescope observes exoplanet where it rains iron – ESO
This strange phenomenon happens because the ‘iron rain’ planet only ever shows one face, its day side, to its parent star, its cooler night side remaining in perpetual darkness. Like the Moon on its orbit around the Earth, WASP-76b is ‘tidally locked’: it takes as long to rotate around its axis as it does to go around the star.
Greater problems are ahead, however.
Behold our dazzling night sky when the Milky Way collides with Andromeda in 4 billion years – Kottke
Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at NASA have predicted that our own Milky Way galaxy and the nearby Andromeda galaxy (M31) will collide about 4 billion years from now. As part of the announcement from 2012, they produced a video of what the collision would look like and a series of illustrations of what our sky will look like during the collision process.
Meanwhile.
Betelgeuse – Quartz
What’s going on with Betelgeuse? There are two possibilities: Betelgeuse will brighten again and continue its pattern, or it will explode.
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