Alien Planet Blacker than Coal found

Coal Planet Found: A new planet has been found by astronomers who described the Planet is darker than Coal.

Terming it as a Coal Planet, the astronomers said, “the strange world, TrES-2b, is a gas giant the size of Jupiter, rather than a solid, rocky body like Earth or Mars reflecting less than one percent of the sunlight falling on it.”

It closely orbits the star GSC 03549-02811, located about 750 light years away in the direction of the constellation of Draco the Dragon.

“TrES-2b is considerably less reflective than black acrylic paint, so it’s truly an alien world,” David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in a press release issued by Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society (RAS)

First spotted five years ago, TrES-2b races around its star at a distance of just five million kilometres (three million miles).

This is scorchingly close when compared to Earth’s 150-million-km (93-million-mile) distance from the Sun and Jupiter’s 778 million kms (483 million miles).

The Planets atmosphere is very hot with temperature more than 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit) and has the presence of  light-absorbing chemicals like vaporised sodium and potassium or titanium oxide.

But none of these substances can explain the planet’s darkness, which is more extreme than any planet or moon in our own Solar System.

“It’s not clear what is responsible for making this planet so extraordinarily dark,” said David Spiegel of Princeton University.

“However, it’s not completely pitch black. It’s so hot that it emits a faint red glow, much like a burning ember or the coils on an electric stove.”

The planet was located using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which collects data from the far reaches of the universe.