Science News Alert! Why These Stars Affect A Planet’s Seasons

Perhaps you're still wondering why different stars appear with seasons.

Each of the planets in our solar system has seasons. However, the seasons that take place on other planets are tremendously different from the traditional spring, summer, winter and fall weather experienced here on Earth according to an article on NASA.

Whereas summer offers a midyear break from the scorching heat, spring and autumn may be the best time to hit the beach on other planets that orbit whirling stars as cited in an article on Science News. The orbits of these planets can definitely take them over regions of their sun which radiate extremely different amounts of heat.

"Seasons on a planet like this must be really strange," Jonathon Ahlers said in a statement. Ahlers is a graduate student at the University of Idaho in Moscow. He presented his findings last June 15 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

There are some stars which spin wildly fast that they bulge in the middle, pushing the equator away from the blazing core, which makes it a lot cooler than the poles. In addition, a fraction of these stars host planets, traveling on cockeyed orbits that alternately take these worlds over the poles and equator of their sun.

In order to see how the differences in solar energy combined with the tilted orbits may affect a planet's seasons, Jonathon Ahlers designed and developed computer simulations. The result would largely depend on how the planet's axis is precisely tipped relative to its orbit. For a planet whose north and south poles periodically face the star's equator, it is easy to get a cooler summer than normal and an extremely cold winter, however spring and autumn can be hotter than summer according to Ahlers. "You get two distinct hottest times of the year," he said.

How a planet is built determines how seasons play: an atmosphere or oceans could relatively mitigate climate extremes. But Ahlers has yet to work out those crucial details. "It's doing a lot," he said. "But what, I don't really know yet," he concluded.