Outer Space – Science does it again as it finds the most stygian, dark planet since Yuggoth became a plutoid. The pleasantly named TrES-2b is blacker than coal, making it the most goth planet in the known universe.

Measurements show that TrES-2b reflects less than one percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it blacker than coal or any planet or moon in our solar system. “TrES-2b is considerably less reflective than black acrylic paint, so it’s truly an alien world,” said astronomer David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), lead author on the paper reporting the research. TrES-2b orbits its star at a distance of only five million Km. Heck, Earth orbits the sun at about 150 million Km which is a lot more.

“It’s not clear what is responsible for making this planet so extraordinarily dark,” stated co-author David Spiegel of Princeton University. “However, it’s not completely pitch black. It’s so hot that it emits a faint red glow, much like a burning ember or the coils on an electric stove.” The planet must be the physical location of Hell, then.

“But remember – that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities isn’t really terrible. It is only to us that it would seem so. Probably this world seemed just as terrible to the beings when they first explored it in the primal age. You know they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R’lyeh when it was above the waters.”
- H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness

TrES-2b orbits the star GSC 03549-02811, which is located about 750 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Draco, somewhere beyond the final frontier.

Read more about this find here and here.