IMAGINE if the sun’s energy increased by 3400 times: Earth’s oceans would instantly boil away. Yet a newly discovered exoplanet is subjected to such heat, making it one of the hottest in our galactic neighbourhood.
Planet HAT-P-7b, spotted about a thousand light years away by a network of small telescopes called HATNet, orbits at only 5.6 million kilometres from its star – around one-tenth of the distance between Mercury and our sun (www.arxiv.org/abs/0803.0746).
The planet’s atmosphere could distribute the solar energy in a number of ways, says Robert Noyes of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but one model suggests temperatures could reach a…
