my twittering

[mollydot]

• 09:50 decluttering. Currently going through a box that was (mostly) brought in the previous move. Most of it's going into the recycling. Phew! #
• 10:00 finding old school projects. #
• 10:10 learning that a planetary embiggening mechanism that would affect all hot Jupiters is perfectly cromulent. #
• 16:35 a friend's sister is looking for a room in or

Comments

a planetary embiggening mechanism that would affect all hot Jupiters is perfectly cromulent

[holmesfan]

Thanks Mollydot. I'm sure that was hugely useful for you, but what does it mean?

Re: a planetary embiggening mechanism that would affect all hot Jupiters is perfectly cromulent

[mollydot]

Um...

I found it when searching for "cromulent" a word that was made up for the Simpsons, as was embiggen. Okay, let's see if I can work it out.

According to wikipedia, a hot Jupiter is a planet (in another solar system) that is the size of Jupiter, or bigger, but that orbits really, really close to its star. Closer than Mercury is to ours. (Now I've really learnt something).

Embiggen means to make bigger. So a planetary embiggening mechanism would probably be a process that makes a planet bigger.

Cromulent means something like good, authentic, sensible. It was used twice in the Simpsons - "It's a perfectly cromulent word", "His cromulent performance embiggened the role of X". Here, I'm reading "is perfectly cromulent" as "makes sense" or "is possible".

So, something like: it makes sense that there be a process which makes really big planets, really close to their stars, bigger.

What that process might be, or what they're saying about it, I haven't a clue, as that sentence is all I got in the google summary.

Re: a planetary embiggening mechanism that would affect all hot Jupiters is perfectly cromulent

[mollydot]

Huh. I've read a bit more of the paper (http://arxiv.org/pdf/0801.4943 if you're terribly curious :-) ) and I think that, rather than something that make a planet bigger, they mean something that keeps a planet bigger than expected. They seem to be mentioning previous studies about processes that stop shrinking. I'm not at all sure though.