Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)
ARTIST'S CONCEPT OF THE HOT PLANET OSIRIS. This is an artistic illustration of the gas giant planet HD 209458b (unofficially named Osiris) located 150 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. This is a "hot Jupiter" class planet. Estimated to be 220 times the mass of Earth. The planet's atmosphere is a seething 2,150 degrees Fahrenheit. It orbits very closely to its bright sunlike star, and
the orbit is tilted edge-on to Earth. This makes the planet an ideal candidate for the Hubble Space Telescope to be used to make precise measurements of the chemical composition of the giant's atmosphere as starlight filters though it. To the surprise of astronomers, they have found much less water vapor in the atmosphere than standard planet-formation models predict.