Upsilon Andromedae made history recently with the discovery that the star parented not just one planet, but three. It was the first multiplanet solar system to be discovered around a sun-like star. The middle world of this system is cooler than the seething inner planet. It does not glow red from the heat of the star, but it is still too warm to maintain global cloud cover. This gives the world a Neptune-like appearance, albeit for completely different reasons. Whereas Neptune appears blue from the high levels of methane in the frigid atmosphere, upsilon Andromedae c appears blue for the same reason the sky on Earth does, Rayleigh scattering. As this world is not tidally locked, it’s normal rotation causes the cloud banding we would expect from a gas giant. It also has several moons. As the middle world is twice the mass of Jupiter, it may have quite massive moons, possibly as large as Mars. Such moons would have their own atmospheres, although at such a close distance to the parent star, they would be desert worlds devoid of water and frequented by global sand storms, as in the image above. Smaller members of upsilon Andromedae c’s entourage would be a barren and rocky as Mercury or the moon. Any moons which wander too close to the planet would break apart into a transitory dust ring. Such a ring would slowly fall into the planet’s atmosphere, darkening the equator into a dusty band.
View a VRML model of the system. Please be patient while the file downloads. For a VRML tour of our galaxy's exoplanets, check out Extrasolar VR.
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