Darkest planet spotted by astronomers

BBC : A planet about 750 light-years away in the Draco constellation has an albedo darker than coal. It reflects less than 1% of its star’s light; in contrast, Earth reflects about 37% of the Sun’s light and Jupiter reflects about 52%. First discovered by the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey in 2006 and named TrES-2b, the planet also lies in the Kepler space telescope’s field of view. David Kipping of Harvard University and David Spiegel of Princeton University used the first four months’ worth of data from Kepler to measure the amount of light coming directly from TrES-2b. The planet is only five million kilometers from its star, and its temperature is probably around 1200 °C—too hot to support reflective cloud cover. However, that is insufficient to explain the near total darkness of TrES-2b. Both Kipping and Spiegel say that something on the planet’s surface must be absorbing light and that it probably involves exotic chemistry that has never been seen before.