The Eye of the Space Dragon
I’ve been reading about TrES-2b – an inexplicably dark planet circling one of the stars in the Draco constellation. It’s a gas giant with an atmosphere of vaporized Na, K, TiO2, and other chemicals that absorb light rather than reflect it. It’s also very, very hot (with temperatures approaching 1,800° Fahrenheit). Too hot for the kind of reflective clouds that enshroud, say, Jupiter. But even this doesn’t fully account for why so little sunlight – less than 1% – reflects off its surface. It’s a mystery. And so the planet vibrates, in my mind, at the interface between science and myth: A galactic anomaly of albedo; the space dragon’s dilated pupil.