Professor Lewis Dartnell, Professor of Science Communication, wrote an article for BBC Sky at Night Magazine about HAT-P-7b, an extra-hot exoplanet which is so hot that its atmosphere is “one of the richest in elements yet seen”.
Talking about the exoplanet, Professor Dartnell wrote: “HAT-P-7b (or Kepler-2b) is an exotic exoplanet. Discovered in 2008, it has a radius greater than that of Jupiter and an orbital plane so titled relative to its star (108 degrees) that it’s nearly in a polar orbit. But what makes the planet truly exceptional is how hot it is. HAT-P-7b hugs its bright, A-class star so tightly that its orbit takes less than three days – it’s over 20 times closer to its sun than Earth is to ours.”
He added: “It is also one of the darkest planets ever observed, with a surface reflection of less than 0.03 – roughly that of a lump of charcoal. The planet is so black it absorbs more than 97% of visible light shining onto it.”
Discussing the team that first analysed the exoplanet, he wrote: “The astronomers used the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher for the Northern hemisphere (HARPS-N)…They observed a single transit of HAT-P-7b across its star on the night of 18 December 2020 and recorded the spectrum of light passing through its atmosphere.
“They reported detecting a whole host of elements including iron, calcium, magnesium, sodium and chromium – possibly titanium too. Bello-Arufe’s work has marked HAT-P-7b as one of the exoplanets with the greatest number of atomic species detected in its atmosphere.”
Read the full article on the BBC Sky at Night website.
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