Featured Image Credit: NASA
A NASA telescope has managed to discover and analyze a mysterious yet horrifying planet that’s located millions of light years away, revealing that it rains glass at 4,300 miles per hour in a collection of deadly weather.
Scientists are often discovering new planets in the far reaches of the universe, with some even offering a close resemblance to Earth, which would provide the possibility for human habitation if they weren't impossibly far away.
One planet that has caught the interest of many inside NASA is HD 189733 b, which is located in the constellation Vulpecula and is around 64,000,000 light-years away from Earth (as reported by UNILAD).
This particular exoplanet was first discovered by French astronomers back in 2005, and bears a striking resemblance to Earth, apart from one key feature - its weather.
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Upon analysis, scientists realized that HD 189733 b was home not only to extreme temperatures but deadly winds and rain. It has even been indicated that it 'rains glass' upon the planet at speeds of up to 4,300 miles per hour.
By far the biggest cause of HD 189733 b's bizarre and extreme weather is its rotation - or lack thereof. It is positioned so close to its parent star, HD 189733, that it has become what's known as 'gravitationally tidally locked'. This makes it so that one side of the planet is always facing the star, whereas the other remains dark.
With a radius around 12.76 times larger than Earth, this causes some extreme temperature variations, as infrared analysis using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that the star-exposed 'day' side is around 500 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the star-opposed 'night' side.
This causes extreme winds to swirl and race around the planet in an attempt to even out the temperature, and wind speeds seven times the speed of sound would make it impossible for any human to survive.
In addition, rock-forming silicate particles melt in the surrounding 2,000°F atmosphere, creating raindrop-like shards of glass that swirl around in the extreme winds, so that certainly wouldn't be a storm you'd want to get caught up in.
Despite the weather making it impossible for humans to visit (let alone live on) HD 189733 b, it is intriguing to consider quite how long it would take for astronauts to reach it.
Human-manned spacecraft typically travel at around 24,691 miles per hour, and with one light-year being 5,878,628,192,999.1 miles, you begin to realize quite how far away the planet is.
Being 376,230,000,000,000,000,000 miles away, it would take approximately 15,237,535,944,271,192 hours, 634,897,331,011,299 days, or 1,739,444,742,497 years. In short, that’s quite a long time.
