Scrolling social media last
night and I saw this headline,
a potato shaped planet has been
discovered and I was like.
Yeah, tell me more.
Inverse.com wrote up a story about how
astronomers discovered a planet with one
of the most unusual shapes ever seen.
They say. Apparently, back in 2014,
astronomers first found this exoplanet
and called it WASP 103 B because it
was near its home star WASP 103.
But they noticed it was
pretty close to its star,
like less than 20,000 miles away.
For some perspective,
Earth on average is 93 million
miles from our home star,
the Sun now being that close to a star,
can do some things to those around it.
Think Kim Kardashian and Kanye
West excuse me, yay?
Anyway, this planet,
which is known as a hot Jupiter,
not another reference to Kardashian.
It's because of the time it
takes to orbit around its star,
and in this case less than
a day couple other things.
Scientists learn about this planet,
it's about twice as big as Jupiter,
and because of its proximity
to its star and its orbit,
it had an oblong shape like like a potato.
Why are we just finding out about this?
Because those scientists just wrote
a really cool paper about it for the
astronomy and Astrophysics journal.
And if you're looking for some light reading,
a lot of big words and explanations
and equations stuff have at it.
But to understand it better to peel it back,
so to speak, to get to that starchy goodness.
We reached out to Chris Anderson
in Twin Falls.
He's the coordinator of the observatory
at the Harris Center for Arts and
Sciences at the College of Southern Idaho.
He tells us it's pretty unusual to
find a planet shaped like a potato,
at least to this degree.
All planets that orbit anybody at all
are going to be somewhat elongated.
So for example, the moon elongates
the earth as the moon goes overhead.
Believe it or not, the ground beneath
your feet rises by about 6 inches.
Now you don't notice that because it happens
over a 12 hour period of time, right?
So it's a very gradual thing.
But yeah, so this is just that
taken to an extreme degree,
because this planet is so close
to the star that it orbits,
it's really being stretched
by those title forces.
OK, so the other thing that is stretching it,
Earth orbits the sun, our star.
Right in 365 days, right?
This one orbits its star in 22 hours,
right? It's 50 times closer to its
star than the Earth is to the sun.
Pretend for a moment that this planet
was the size of the earth and it
was orbiting a star like our Sun.
It would be experiencing 125,000 times
more tidal force than the Earth does.
It's like how fast is that going?
Oh boy, yeah, that so that would be a
difficult thing to calculate off the top
of my head to give you a sense of scale,
I mean our earth goes around the
sun at 66,000 miles an hour.
So it's gonna be a lot faster than that,
but Chris did some quick math for us
and he determined that the potato
planet cruises around its star,
which is represented by this basketball
here at 500,000 miles an hour,
which is about 7 1/2 times faster than we do.
You know, we don't really
notice the sort of centrifugal
effect of going around our sun.
I'm guessing on that world it
would be fairly noticeable.
OK, OK the other thing.
The potato planet doesn't rotate,
doesn't rotate around its star.
The side is always facing the sun,
blistering hot the other side freezing cold.
Now it's a Jupiter like world,
so it has no solid surface on which to stand.
So as potatoes goes it's a pretty
squishy potato. It's a hot one too.
It's a very hot, at least on one side.
Yeah, it's not. It's not gonna
be very evenly baked, I'm afraid
that's true, but crispy,
which is how we like him,
at least on one side, yeah?
And probably frozen on the other.
Like it was created by Mr Simplot himself,
frozen and fried, and it's relatable.
How many of us can identify with being pulled
into a potato shaped by stress, right?
I'm sure apparently finding a potato
shaped planet is pretty rare though.
Another one they found is currently being
ripped apart by its star mashing it.
If you will space it's cold place man.
So why does this matter?
Well, finding something like
this helps us understand how
planets and solar systems form.
It's not in our solar system,
by the way, this potato planet,
but it is in our Galaxy and Chris tells us.
It's about 1200 light years away.
About as far away as the most distant star
that you could see without a telescope.
By the way,
we are now taking submissions for what to
call this supersonic spinning space spud.