Comments on: Is a Scorching, Earth-Like Exoplanet a Withered Up “Hot Jupiter”?

By: G.E.Delerium

G.E.Delerium — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:46:21 +0000

I don’t know of any coordinated effort. Why would people gang up on space exploration? That would be ridiculous. I just want fruit stripe gum to live up to its name, and to not have a leaky condom lead to AID’s.

By: amphiox

amphiox — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:35:32 +0000

re #5,

One of these posts pops up on almost every single space exploration thread. . . . It’s almost like some kind of coordinated effort. I wonder how much collective grey matter they are expending on it?

By: G.E.Delerium

G.E.Delerium — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:36:59 +0000

Can’t you guys direct your collective grey matter to something more helpful to mankind, like a vaccine for AID’s or chewing gum that doesn’t lose its flavor after 10 minutes?

By: Kyle

Kyle — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:04:07 +0000

Also, right now it is losing rocky mass, but in its earlier days it would have been losing much lighter elements and it could have been shedding those at a much faster pace…

By: Andrew Moseman

Andrew Moseman — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:44:34 +0000

Amphiox,

Great question, so I asked Brian Jackson. He responds with a clarification: Right now the loss would be about half an Earth mass per billion years (in our years, not Corot-7b’s). But that amount could have been much higher in the past because the star would’ve been brighter and the planet would’ve been bigger, so the planet would’ve received more energy. Thus, he says, large sizes for Corot-7b, even as high as 100 Earth masses, are plausible.

Andrew

By: amphiox

amphiox — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:15:11 +0000

Or is it that by “year” they are actually referring to a single revolution of Corot-7b, rather than an earth year?

By: amphiox

amphiox — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:04:09 +0000

I’m missing something with the numbers given here. With a rate of mass loss of 1/2 earth every billion years, it would take some 600 billion years for a jovian-sized gas giant to become the size of Corot-7b. Even a Neptune sized planet would take longer than the age of the universe to get small enough with that rate. Are they postulating that the rate of mass loss was higher in the past?