clipped from: space.newscientist.com One of the most exotic planets known around another star just got a little more bizarre, thanks to new data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The latest observations make it the blackest and hottest planet ever discovered.
"What we found is that it was not just a hot planet, which we expected, but that it was really hot," says team leader Joseph Harrington, an astronomer at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, US.
Temperatures on the planet HD 149026b, which lies about 25 times closer to its star than Earth does to the Sun, reach a scorching 2040º Celsius – almost as hot as some small stars.
To make the observations, the researchers took advantage of the fact that the planet is one of only 17 known to "transit" – or pass directly in front of – its star as seen from Earth. So by observing how much the star's infrared light dropped when the planet passed behind it, they calculated the planet's own infrared emissions.
