NASA releases amazing clip showing auroras on an exoplanet

Nov 28, 2011 15:40 GMT  ·  By

Taking CoRoT-2b as a reference point for hot Jupiter-class planets everywhere, NASA experts recently created a new video, hypothesizing about how auroras would look like on distant worlds. This particular exoplanet is located about 880 light-years away from Earth.

However, it is located 97 percent closer to its parent star than Earth is from the Sun. This means that coronal mass ejections about 100,000 times more powerful than the Sun's blast away at its atmosphere with tremendous strength, removing 5 million tons of matter per second.

This means that the hot Jupiter lies within a massive cloud of particles that were at one point stripped from its atmosphere. This further increases the beauty of its prospective auroras, if one somehow manages to remain alive for long enough to notice them in those conditions.

CoRoT-2b is a textbook example of a class of planets that includes the bulk of the 700+ exoplanets that have been officially confirmed thus far, Universe Today reports.