Reel Big Fish is a group with which you may not be familiar. Their stuff is a heckuva lot better than most things you hear on the radio today. You don’t hear them on the radio, because, well, Ska/Punk isn’t the most popular format today. This was their most popular mainstream-type song, appropriately named “Sell Out.”
What’s been on your mind? Got something you’d like to share? A topic to discuss? It’s Thursday Night Open Thread.
Who wants to start?
— try living on a planet that rains iron!
[or working for an organization that can’t think of a name for a very large telescope.]
Very Large Telescope Observes Exoplanet Where It Rains Iron
European Southern Observatory / March 11, 2020 / Phys.orgResearchers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have observed an extreme planet where they suspect it rains iron. The ultra-hot giant exoplanet has a day side where temperatures climb above 2400 degrees Celsius, high enough to vaporise metals. Strong winds carry iron vapour to the cooler night side where it condenses into iron droplets.
“One could say that this planet gets rainy in the evening, except it rains iron,” says David Ehrenreich, a professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. He led a study, published today in the journal Nature, of this exotic exoplanet. Known as WASP-76b, it is located some 640 light-years away in the constellation of Pisces.
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.
… like a ferrous wheel …
“Surprisingly, however, we do not see the iron vapour in the morning,” says Ehrenreich. The reason, he says, is that “it is raining iron on the night side of this extreme exoplanet.”
Ironmonger!
This result was obtained from the very first science observations done with ESPRESSO, in September 2018, by the scientific consortium who built the instrument: a team from Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Spain and ESO.
ESPRESSO — the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations — was originally designed to hunt for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. However, it has proven to be much more versatile. “We soon realised that the remarkable collecting power of the VLT and the extreme stability of ESPRESSO made it a prime machine to study exoplanet atmospheres,” says Pedro Figueira, ESPRESSO instrument scientist at ESO in Chile.
Researchers at Louisiana State University have discovered a new species of shrew, which they have named Crocidura caudipilosa.
