HD 209458 b Atmosphere Evaporation

[ajtribick]

During transits it appears that HD 209458 b's atmosphere is evaporating into space because of the ferocious solar wind at its distance from the parent star. So I decided to model it in Celestia.

Yes, it does rely on Celestia not drawing anything if the mesh file doesn't exist (as far as I know Celestia does not support multiple classes), but as I couldn't find the file for the comet tail mesh I decided to just put a comet in there.

Adding the following description to extrasolar.ssc will add the evaporating atmosphere:

Code: Select all

"b Atmosphere Evaporation" "HD 209458"   # V376 Peg

{
   Class "comet"
   Mesh "nonexistent.3ds"   # not the most elegant way of doing this...

   Radius 0.4         # to get the comet tail the right size

   InfoURL "http://www2.iap.fr/exoplanetes/index_en.html"

   EllipticalOrbit {
      Period          0.0097
      SemiMajorAxis   0.044
      Eccentricity    0
      Inclination     71.7
      AscendingNode   325.1
      ArgOfPericenter 205
      MeanAnomaly     148
   }

   Albedo 0
}


The orbit data are exactly the same as those for the planet HD 209458 except the semimajor axis is slightly smaller.