HD 80606b's orbit around its host star - it's year - is 111.4 Earth-days long. Its day - one rotation about its axis - is thought to last about 34 hours (though the scientists don't measure this value directly). The interesting thing is that its orbit is very elongated, the most eccentric of any known planet.
Laughlin's team used the Spitzer Space Telescope to peer at the extrasolar planet HD 80606b, a gas giant four times the mass of Jupiter with the most eccentric orbit of any planet known. At its farthest, the planet is about 130 million kilometres from its parent star, or roughly 85% of the distance from the Earth to the Sun. But once every 111 days, it closes in to a mere 5 million kilometres, exposing itself to more than 800 times the radiation it gets at its farthest before hurtling away again.
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has observed a planet that heats up to red-hot temperatures in a matter of hours before quickly cooling back down. The "hot-headed" planet is HD 80606b, a gas giant that orbits a star 190 light-years from Earth. It was already known to be quite unusual, with an orbit shuttling it nearly as far out as Earth is from our sun, and much closer in than our planet Mercury. Astronomers used Spitzer, an infrared observatory, to measure heat emanating from the planet as it whipped behind and close to its star. In just six hours, the planet's temperature rose from 800 to 1,500 Kelvin (980 to 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit).
Astronomers have found a planet with a galactic case of hot flashes. In just six hours, this planet four times the size of Jupiter heats up by more than 1,200 degrees, according to a study published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. "It's the first observation of changing weather" on a planet outside our solar system, said study author Gregory Laughlin, an astronomy professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to study the planet. Change is a mild way to put it for the lifeless world, called HD80606b, where the word "mild" would never enter a weather forecast.
The extra-solar planet HD80606B as its eccentric orbit brings it extremely close to its star, causing sudden and intense heating, driving strong winds and causing the planet to glow. This simulation was based on a hydrodynamical calculation of the planets response to the heating, followed by a 3-D radiative transfer calculation to determine how the emitted and reflected light would be perceived by the human eye. This animation is the view from a static point along the earth's line of sight. Credit: Daniel Kasen, Jonathan Langton, Greg Laughlin, UCSC