What would sunset look like if you were on the planet HD209458b, a gas giant orbiting a star 150 light years away? According to exoplanetary scientist Frédéric Pont, it looks like this:
Isn't that pretty? And there's quite a bit of science in that, too. First things first: HD209458 is a star pretty similar to our Sun. It was one of the first stars determined to have a planet orbiting it (way back in 1999) -- the aforementioned HD209458b, nicknamed Osiris -- and it turns out the planet's orbit is so close to edge-on as seen from Earth that we see that planet passing directly in between us and that star once per orbit. When the planet transits that star the amount of light we see dips a little bit. From that we can get the period of the orbit and the size of the planet (a bigger planet blocks ...
