'Most distant' weather pictures

[OXO]

'Most distant' weather pictures

A Nasa space telescope has delivered the first weather forecast from a planet outside our Solar System.

The world, known as Upsilon Andromedae b, orbits close into a star that is 380 trillion km from Earth.

The Spitzer Space Telescope has been able to detect distinct day and night temperatures on the planet.

The results, reported in the journal Science, suggest weather systems transport very little heat from one side of the planet to the other.

This means one face of the planet is blisteringly hot, while the other is frigid in comparison.

"Such a large difference between the day and night sides reveals very interesting things about how heat and air masses flow on the planet. It makes for a very unusual climate and weather on this planet," said co-researcher Dr James Cho from Queen Mary University of London, UK.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6047626.stm

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Makes you wonder how they know what a "usual" climate is and how they know that there is air on the planet.

Captain Chaos

[FLO]

Good find James 8)