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HD 149026b. “This boiling world is one of the hottest and densest ever found. None too pleasant to visit, the surface of the planet is about 3700 degrees Fahrenheit (more than 2,000 degrees Celsius) — about three times hotter than the surface of Venus, the hottest planet in our solar system. HD 149026b is so hot that scientists think it absorbs almost all of the heat from its star, and reflects almost no light. The scorching ball is smaller than Saturn, but has a core that weighs 70 to 90 times the mass of the entire Earth.” https://lnkd.in/dDZa-gH View in LinkedIn

EXTREME PLANETS tend to present with any of the following characteristics: extreme heat, coldness, magnetic properties, density, gravity winds, toxic atmospheres and charged particle fluxes. And the presence of exotic matter called plasma. In most cases, these are many fold greater than found on Earth. We have only just scratched the surface of these planets in our near-observable universe. There will, undoubtedly, be more. View in LinkedIn

Glimpse into a Girona courtyard. View in LinkedIn

THE UPCOMING POSTS. Space weather is the prelude for the next series of posting sections, namely the range of extreme conditions found in space, and thus, what impact that might have on chemistry, physics and mathematics as we know it. Our sciences remain tethered in our blinkered view that the Earth is the end of the universe; to the contrary, it is not even a particularly relevant part of it, a tiny backwater in an obscure corner. View in LinkedIn

THIS ENDS the very extensive and remarkably good review of space weather, which is a backdrop for the effects of Earth’s weather. We rarely have, in a single review, such a comprehensive and detailed summary of conditions in space, written in accessible language, describing a universe that is far from cold and empty. Rather, it is a hugely dynamic environment with immense scale, structure and distant impact, with intergalactic oceans of highly energetic particles and energy fields forming space conditions. This review should be kept bedside for a lifetime. View in LinkedIn

A REMARKABLE PHYSICIST. “I think of my lifetime in physics as divided into three periods. In the first period . . . I was in the grip of the idea that Everything is Particles. . . . I call my second period Everything is Fields. . . . Now I am in the grip of a new vision, that Everything is Information.” (John Archibald Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam). https://lnkd.in/g-p9M-4 View in LinkedIn