Exoplanet Explorer: Gliese 504b “Pinkie Pie”

Continuing our exploration of the exoplanets, today we’re visiting a planet called Gliese 504b.

Gliese 504b isn’t the kind of alphanumeric gobbledygook we usually get for exoplanet designations, but still… I prefer actual names, or at least nicknames. I think it’s easier to write about a planet when it has a name, and names help give us a sense of a planet’s personality.

So as of today, I’m officially renaming Gliese 504b Pinkie Pie.

Wait, I shouldn’t have used the word “officially.” I’m just some guy with a blog. Only the International Astronomy Union has the authority to…

“Pinkie Pie” was discovered in 2013 orbiting a Sun-like star about 57 lightyears away in the constellation Virgo. This was one of those rare cases where astronomers were able to directly image a planet orbiting another star, and they could even identify the planets color. This made headlines, because the planet turned out to be pink. Glorious, fabulous bright hot pink!

The pink color is apparently due to the planet’s age. It’s only a few hundred million years old, which is young for a planet, and it’s still glowing from the heat of its formation. It appears to be a gas giant, several times more massive than Jupiter.

Also, it seems the topmost layers of clouds aren’t there. Perhaps the kinds of swirling, opaque clouds we’re accustomed to seeing on giant planets like Jupiter or Saturn will form later on as Pinkie Pie grows older and cools off. In the meantime, as telescope technology improves, Pinkie Pie may offer us an unprecedented opportunity to see how gas giants are structured on the inside.

Before I end this post, there is one more thing that you should know about Pinkie Pie. It’s rather important. There’s an ongoing mystery as to how a planet so young could be orbiting so far away from its parent star. According to our current understanding of planetary formation, gas giants like Pinkie Pie should be much closer in. Unless maybe Pinkie Pie isn’t a planet after all!

Yes, Pluto isn’t the only one to have its planet status called into question. Except while Pluto is essentially too small for planethood, Pinkie Pie might be too big. Some astronomers suggest that Pinkie Pie should be classified as a brown dwarf.

Of course that depends on how the term brown dwarf is defined. More about that in Friday’s edition of Sciency Words.