TrES-2b: Astronomers Discover Darkest Known Exoplanet (PHOTO)

Hopefully you're not too afraid of the dark.

Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft have discovered a "Jupiter-sized gas giant" believed to be the darkest planet in the galaxy.

The planet -- named TrES-2b -- is located 750 light years away in the direction of the constellation Draco, and according to lead author David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, it is indeed a remarkable find.

"TrES-2b is considerably less reflective than black acrylic paint, so it's truly an alien world," Kipping said in a statement.

Unlike planets in our solar system, TrES-2b lacks reflective clouds due to its extreme heat, a condition which researchers believe explains the planet's extraordinary darkness. The clouds that surround Jupiter, for example, reflect over a third of the sunlight in their path.

A few more details from the press release:

TrES-2b orbits its star at a distance of only three million miles. The star's intense light heats TrES-2b to a temperature of more than 1,800° Fahrenheit - much too hot for ammonia clouds. Instead, its exotic atmosphere contains light-absorbing chemicals like vaporized sodium and potassium, or gaseous titanium oxide. Yet none of these chemicals fully explain the extreme blackness of TrES-2b.

According to Space.com, the discovery "reinforces the idea that our solar system may not be as typical as we once thought, with an extraordinary variety of worlds potentially filling our galaxy."

And while the planet is indeed really, really dark, it's not a complete blackout.

"It's not clear what is responsible for making this planet so extraordinarily dark," co-author David Spiegel added. "However, it's not completely pitch black. It's so hot that it emits a faint red glow, much like a burning ember or the coils on an electric stove."

In July, the Hubble Space Telescope found a fourth moon circling Pluto, and earlier this month NASA reported the possibility of flowing water on Mars.

CORRECTION: This article has been changed to reflect that TrES-2b is located 750 light years away, not 750 million light years.

Check out an artist's conception of the distant exoplanet:

Comments

[zachmillsdood]

11:57 AM on 09/09/2011

Truly incredible.

[Tmboy]

09:25 AM on 09/09/2011

oooohhhh she's preeeeetty

[Dstarman21]

05:47 AM on 09/09/2011

The Dark Side is strong with the force of gravity. Perhaps it is dark because the speed of light cannot entirely escape it's gravitational pull.

Darth Vader's Home World. LOL

[MTGradwell]

06:48 AM on 08/15/2011

It may not actually be the darkest planet in the Universe, but it definitely Tr(i)ES-2b.

[commute1042]

08:17 PM on 08/15/2011

HAHA

[Ironsi]

12:12 PM on 09/06/2011

nice

[Riven]

08:30 PM on 08/14/2011

The gas giant Jupiter has many moons, and the artist's conception seems to assume that the dark planet has moons as well. Does anyone know whether we yet have the technology to find these moons and how that techology works? I understand that one of the difficulties inherent in finding other earth-sized planets is that, relative to nebulae, stars and gas giants, these planets would be very small--a problem that would, I assume, be compounded with moons orbiting a planet 750 light years distant.

[palindrom]

10:24 PM on 08/14/2011

I don't know if we can find moons, but if you have a transiting exoplanet -- one which passes in front of its parent star, causing the light to diminish slightly -- you can see tiny disturbances in its orbit, because they affect the timing of the ingress and egress from eclipse. I know that for some of the Kepler data they're able to see the effects of planets in multiple systems pulling on each other, which are pretty small.

That said, the moons of Jupiter are so much smaller than Jupiter itself that I don't know if they'd create a detectable timing signal.

[SimonBao]

12:59 AM on 08/15/2011

No, we are not able to detect any moons around any exoplanets, not even around Hot Jupiters or any other kind of Gas Giant.

It might be possible, at some point, for Kepler to get a hint of a moon orbiting a giant planet, maybe, if that planet is far enough away from its own star, if the moon is large enough, and if it orbits its planet at a fairly speedy clip. But I haven't read any speculation that Kepler will be able to achieve that.

[Nick Rowley]

11:37 AM on 08/15/2011

Yeah we know HOW it would be possible, in theory, to detect moons: The moon would cause a blip in the signal or the image from the larger body, but there's no way that we are likely to see that any time soon.

[Philosopher-king]

08:01 PM on 08/14/2011

Send the Tea Party there, it suits them well!

[h1ren]

10:19 AM on 09/09/2011

Their intellect might suggest that the "dark planet" is for people of color...

[KMAJ]

02:04 AM on 08/14/2011

The Goth homeworld has finally been located!

[Nightangle]

03:51 PM on 08/14/2011

I always thought this was Keplar's mission in 2006. Was I wrong ?

[palindrom]

10:25 PM on 08/14/2011

Kepler wasn't launched until sometime last year -- I think -- but certainly much more recently than 2006.

This particular object was found in ground-based searches before the Kepler mission was launched.

[LintLass]

08:01 PM on 08/14/2011

Indeed. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6Oh4aaLCFM

Black planet...;.. :)

[Vanderbil Covington]

01:16 AM on 08/14/2011

It will be soon revealed, the largest planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus are not entirely gaseous. They do have deep gaseous atomspheres but they also have surface layers due to enormous gravitational compression causing stratified solidification. Even though unrecognizable to humans, there is life here

[Nightangle]

03:54 PM on 08/14/2011

I've always thought so, even when I was a little girl, when my Dad said "the man on the moon". My friends say it was silly. Still . . .

If these planets older than the earth, which sustained life form, evolved and then adapt - maybe even with hostile environment, these life forms could have evolved, adapt and procreate.

Such wonders - unimaginable !

[Riven]

11:03 PM on 08/14/2011

Life on these planets, if it does exist, would have to be able to sustain enormous pressure--many times greater than the pressure borne by those weird angler fish and ghostly shrimp that survive in the deepest reaches of the ocean. The probe that Galileo dropped into Jupiter's atmosphere was crushed before it penetrated very far at all. Of course, a probe, unlike a life form, lacks the ability to adapt, so who knows?

[Nick Rowley]

11:45 AM on 08/15/2011

And of course, when people say "life" they really mean "sentient life"and really, if there is sentient life on any of the tiny balls at the heart of gas giants, I'm not sure it would be comprehensible to us or vice versa considering the vast difference between the conditions where our distinct sentience developed.

[Vanderbil Covington]

12:59 AM on 08/14/2011

Astrophysicist are beginning to admit the universe is teaming with planets. Every star in the cosmos has planets, just as this solar system. The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, having the capacity to spawn life forms for at least 1 billion years. Many planets are far older. Although far different than this planet, others have evolved life forms which adapted to conditions considered extreme. One of the grandest mysteries of existence involves the life force to adapt viable, procreative physical life forms. The minds of humans cannot envision or imagine what wonders lay beyond or what influence they have shared in human history

[palindrom]

09:11 AM on 08/14/2011

"Astrophysi­cist are beginning to admit the universe is teaming with planets."

Actually, astronomers have suspected this all along, but the techniques for proving that it's true have only been developed over the last couple of decades. So "beginning to admit" isn't quite the right phrase. We just didn't know one way or the other.

[Nightangle]

03:56 PM on 08/14/2011

That's true. 'am no professional astromer or astrophysicist, but this quest was started way back, as I recall, even before the Keplar's mission.

Is that correct. Tell me more.

[Nightangle]

03:43 PM on 08/14/2011

'am an avid astro geek since probably 3 years old when my Dad held me up and point to the heavens. I've always thought that there are many life forms out there, and growing up with my Dad who is civil engineer, and 2 of five brothers who work for NASA an aerospace and a propulsion engineers. I've always have been fascinated with the universe beyond ours.

With planets older than ours, there's great possibilities they more advance, and yet follows the same principles of evolution, adaptation and procreation. Such wonders.

Oh yes siree, I've envisions in that early age these alternate life forms whenever I gaze into my Cassegrain telescope, a used one I got for my 16th birthday. Imagine living in a hostile environment, and trying to evolve and adapt, and the mechanisms involved.

OMG - at 29, I want to live forever to witness this wonders.

[David305]

10:35 PM on 08/13/2011

"good news everyone!"

[KMAJ]

02:02 AM on 08/14/2011

Heh, I got the reference.

[SimonBao]

07:40 PM on 08/13/2011

Not to be all wonky or anything, but...

That artist's depiction is anything BUT a depiction of the planet described in the article - even though it does come from the Center for Astrophysics. Is it perhaps an artist's depiction made a few years ago when Tres2B was first discovered, and it was assumed it was just another "hot Jupiter," another hot gas giant? An image crafted before Tres2B's darkness was guessed at?

The planet in the picture clearly has well-developed, counter-rotating cloud formations that are obviously reflecting light from somewhere or something. In fact, the cloud formations are banded and even show off at least 2 quite significant storms - and that's physically possible only a planet with a quite substantial atmosphere (Jupiter, Neptune, etc). Tres2B may have an exotic atmosphere, but none of the articles on the planet suggest it can look like this.

Counter-rotating cloud formations are also possible only on a planet with a dense atmosphere which *rotates* on it's axis - which Tres2B doesn't - it's supposed to be tidally locked with one side permanently facing its star.

The planet's star is in the background, so we should be looking at the planet's even darker than extremely black "dark side," yet it's depicted as reflecting or emitting bucketloads of light, which the article says is impossible.

I'm just sayin'....

[exPatPatti]

09:05 PM on 08/13/2011

As they often do, people sacrifice realism for attractiveness for the benefit of mainstream interest.

[Nightangle]

04:39 PM on 08/14/2011

It ignited my imagination though.

[jwcmass]

10:50 PM on 08/14/2011

Well, I don't know when the artist rendering was done, you may well be correct that it was 5 years ago.

Since we have no way to directly observe these planets, the artists are relying to a certain extent on guesswork. The idea is to give the public some idea of what the planet may look like.

It is rather similar to the way dinosaurs are depicted by artist rendering.

While we can have a good idea of the skeletal structure of dinosaurs looked like, we really are guessing as to what their skin looked like, what their coloring was, and so forth.

[SimonBao]

11:06 PM on 08/14/2011

Agreed. And I have no objection to artists' renderings of exo-planets, I quite like them.

It's just that this illustration bears no relationship to the actual news, which is a description of its slightly glowing but dark, matte black appearance.

[firebirdam7]

06:17 PM on 08/13/2011

the universe never stops surprising us. thanks to Nasa, scientist and all the astronomers we can see beyond our planet and see the beauty of the universe.

[rfmaneater]

12:05 PM on 08/13/2011

If it is 750 light years away how do they know it is still there?

[24fans]

05:45 PM on 08/13/2011

How do I know you wrote this comment?

[rfmaneater]

07:10 PM on 08/13/2011

What we see is 750 years ago is all I am saying because we see the light that travels at 1 light year per year. It is in fact millions of miles away from the image that we saw.

[exPatPatti]

09:06 PM on 08/13/2011

They/we don't.

[Kalikat]

11:39 AM on 08/13/2011

Gee kinda makes that movie about that dark planet where the alien and the earth guy fight more acceptable HUH.

[Nightangle]

04:11 PM on 08/14/2011

I can't begin to tell you how I envisioned these aliens forms. Maybe they are not as hostile.

[hazbro24]

11:30 AM on 08/13/2011

Hey, that's where Anakin and Obi One went at it.

[Nightangle]

04:16 PM on 08/14/2011

ha ha - my favorite characters, an love obi wan when he yelled "democracy" !

[palindrom]

10:28 PM on 08/14/2011

Somehow it occurred to me if she'd said ---

"Help us, obese one Kenobi, you're our only hope!"