Interesting travel locations

As I'm sure all of you know that space is really big. Apart from the fact that we and other complex life forms exist, our little corner of it all, is pretty unremarkable.

In fact, there are planets out there that almost defy imagination. Today we're going to take a look at a couple of these weird places. I'll stick to planets we know about, and not speculative planets, like carbon planets, that we only theorize about. Not that carbon planets wouldn't be cool. Imagine a world with seas made from crude oil and tar. A planet where it rains gasoline. And instead of boring old dirt, you have coal and diamonds. But we have no solid evidence of them. Yet.

So. first up on our cavalcade is Bellerophon.

He was the guy in Greek mythology who nabbed himself the Pegasus BTW. Anyway, Bellerophon the planet, is a gas giant about 150 times more massive than the Earth, but that's not the cool part. There are after all lots of big planets in space. No, the cool part, is that it's close proximity to it's sun means that it's average temperature is 1000 C (1800 F) and it's massive winds rage at 1000 kph. Keep in mind that a human body is cremated at about 700 C, and the fastest Earth wind on record is 407 kph. Maybe Bellerophon isn't so cool after all. Makes a great incinerator though.

From Bellerophon we travel to COROT-exo-3b.

This lovely little tourist attraction is the same size as Jupiter, but unlike the gas giant, COROT is solid, which makes it 20 times as massive as Jupiter. Before you say “that's nothing” it means that we would way 50 times what we weigh on Earth. I weigh roughly 72 kg, which would mean my COROT weight is 3600 kg. If I were to set foot on this planet, my skeleton would be crushed instantly. I think I'll stay home.

Third and last of our friendly interstellar neighborhoods is WASP-12b.

If Bellerophon is to chilly for you, go to WASP-12b. It's the planet closest to its sun anywhere, at least as far as we know. Where as we are 149,600,000 km from our sun, WASP is only 3.4 million kilometer from its star. This means that the surface temperature is a scorching 2200 C (4000 F). More than twice that of Bellerophon. To put that into perspective, aluminum melts at 660 C, steel melts at about 1500 C, and platinum at 1770 C. The surface is twice as hot as lava, and to really make you dizzy, WASP-12b orbits its sun once every 24 Earth hours.

That's all for this week, so go out and enjoy ol' mother Earth. I think she deserves it. See you next week.