Explanation:
Why is this planet so dark?
Planet
TrES-2b reflects back less than one percent of the light it receives, making it darker than any known planet or moon, darker even than
coal.
Jupiter-sized
TrES-2b orbits extremely close to a
sun-like star 750 light years away, and was discovered producing slight eclipses in 2006 using the modest 10-cm telescopes of the
Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES).
The alien world's strange darkness, however, was only
uncovered recently by observations indicating its slight reflective glow by the Sun-orbiting
Kepler satellite.
An artist's drawing of planet is
shown above, complete with unsubstantiated speculation on possible moons.
Reasons for TrES-2b's darkness remain unknown and are an active topic of research.
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