Shape of Hot Jupiters

Whenever I consider a hot Jupiter, I think of a spherical world. More spherical than that gas planets of our solar system due to a tidally slowed rotation period. Doing an image search on HD 209458 b, I found this interesting picture.


From here.

Could the planet be shaped like that? What about other bloated planets like TrES-4 b?

... That's scary. How am I going to get that shape in Celestia!

Nice find by the way.

NuclearVacuum wrote:

... That's scary. How am I going to get that shape in Celestia!

Nice find by the way.

I don't know. Maybe toying with oblateness?

Picture represents the expanded atmosphere.

Using this Lagrange point finder, I get the distances of L₁ and L₂ as being 4.4 and 4.6 planetary radii away from the planet respectively, so there shouldn't be particularly much distortion of the main bulk of the planet.

As for getting Roche lobe shapes in Celestia, check out my W UMa (contact) binaries add-on.

Plus - should be planetology?

Lazarus W-UMas model looks really nice. But as for me I prefer generate W-UMa stars within spectbins.stc.
I get non contact objects but it works good anyway

Well I personally think his W UMa addon is a perfect (and very much needed) addition to Celestia.

NuclearVacuum wrote:

... That's scary. How am I going to get that shape in Celestia!

I only said that as a joke, I had no idea that it would be the topic. Wow!

Anyway, I like the W UMa addon! Nice find.