Newly discovered exoplanet is literally boiling away

[Amster Dan]

Source: Los Angeles Times

By Thomas H. Maugh II

May 21, 2012, 10:47 a.m.


A newly discovered exoplanet orbiting a distant star is literally boiling away as heat from its sun melts rock and turns it into dust that trails the planet in its orbit, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers. They reported in the Astrophysical Journal that this is apparently the first time that such a disintegrating planet has been observed.



Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-exoplanet-disintegrating-20120521,0,3772221.story

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Short article, short excerpt. But don't you get the feeling that headline will be written of Earth (as observed from Tau Ceti 6) a hundred years from now? And it won't even be our Sun that did the damage, it will have been us.

[Warpy]

1. We're not nearly that powerful

However, make that a billion or two years down the road, that will happen as the sun turns into a red giant.

We might be powerful enough to raise the level of the oceans and drown our coastal cities. We might even be powerful enough to create a huge band of Death Valley type desert around the planet's midsection.

We are not powerful enough to boil rocks.

[Amster Dan]

3. The headline.......

mentioned nothing about boiling rocks. As DUer bemildered stated in another thread: "Methane: fine global warming gas by itself, converts to CO2 over a decade or so, sucking O2 from the atmosphere in the process, and untold brazillions of tons of it lying around in cold places, it's a recipe for a positive feedback loop, a recipe for extreme change."

[Posteritatis]

6. The very first sentence of the article, on the other hand... (nt)

[Amster Dan]

7. I'm not taking about "the very first sentence of the article."

I'm talking about the fact that we're on our way to becoming Venus 2!

[slackmaster]

2. It's probably a dry heat

No biggie.

[Amster Dan]

4. So is Fire!

[bluedigger]

5. There's always someone worse off than you are!

I'm still not going to be complacent...

[Ian David]

8. It's not "boiling away." It's being used to build a Ring World.

Okay, probably not.

[Art_from_Ark]

9. If the rock is being melted, it's not being turned into dust

Vapor, maybe, but not dust.