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| This artist's illustration conceptualizes the swirling clouds identified by the James Webb Space Telescope in the atmosphere of exoplanet VHS 1256 b. The planet is about 40 light-years from Earth and orbits two stars that are locked in their own tight rotation. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)) |
NASA's prolific James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made yet another
stunning discovery.
The pioneering observatory just peered directly into the atmosphere of a
giant exoplanet with two suns (like Tatooine from "Star Wars") known as
VHS 1256 b
— and found a roiling world with turbulent clouds made of silicates, similar
to sand here on Earth, as announced in a recently published article in
Astrophysical Journal Letters.
This report of unpleasant but oh-so-interesting exoplanet weather comes from
JWST's unique ability to collect detailed spectra of objects in space,
allowing scientists to figure out their compositions. Although
JWST has shown us spectra of exoplanets
before, this is the first time it has done so by actually collecting light
from the planet itself, in a method known as direct imaging.
VHS 1256b lies about 40 light-years away from Earth. It's a strange world,
nothing like our own blue planet. It's about 19 times more massive than
Jupiter, for example, orbits two stars instead of one, and takes almost 10,000
years to go around those host stars.
"VHS 1256 b is about four times farther from its stars than Pluto is from
our sun, which makes it a great target for Webb," said Brittany Miles, an
astrophysicist at the University of Arizona and lead author on the new
study, in a
press release. "That means the planet's light is not mixed with light from its stars."
The spectra showed signs of clouds made of silicates, which periodically
rain down into the depths of the planet, moving about in an atmosphere as
hot as a flame, around 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit (815 degrees Celsius).
Silicate clouds have no equivalent here on Earth, other than maybe being in
a cloud of hot sand.
"The finer silicate grains in its atmosphere may be more like tiny particles
in smoke," said University of Edinburgh astrophysicist Beth Biller, part of
the research team, in the press release. "The larger grains might be more
like very hot, very small sand particles."
The team also detected water, methane, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide on
VHS 1256b — a whole slew of different chemicals, making this the "largest
number of molecules ever identified all at once on a planet outside our
solar system," according to the press release. The team is still working on
sorting through all those detected particles, revising their models to
figure out the tempestuous atmosphere on this exoplanet.
"This is not the final word on this planet," Miles said. "It is the
beginning of a large-scale modeling effort to fit Webb's complex data."
Source: Space.com
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Space & Astrophysics