Hot Worlds

NASA's ground-based Wide Angle Search for Planets has turned up three incredibly hot worlds orbiting sun-like stars.

All three are so-called "hot Jupiters"-- gas giants orbiting extremely close to their stars. In these cases, the planets range from 20 to 40 times nearer their stars than Earth is to the Sun. That means they are moving at incredible speeds and likely keep one hemisphere to the star, as the Moon does to Earth. The calculations work out that the star hemispheres of these worlds could be 3,400 degrees Fahrenheit. That would make Venus seem positively balmy!