Updated March 16, 2020, 3:12 p.m.
With temperatures around 2,400 degrees Celsius, it is so hot on the day side of the exoplanet Wasp-76b that metals evaporate. On the other hand, it is much cooler on the night side. As a result, iron rains from the sky there.
It rains iron in the evening: astronomers have observed an exoplanet with a special form of extreme weather. On the day side of the gas giant 640 light years away in the constellation Pisces, it gets so hot that metals melt.
The team of observers led by David Ehrenreich from the University of Geneva has detected significant amounts of iron vapor in the planet’s atmosphere, as the researchers did in the British journal “Nature” to report.
It gets up to 2,400 degrees hot on planet
“A fraction of this iron is entered on the night side due to the rotation of the planet and the atmospheric winds,” explains co-author María Rosa Zapatero Osorio from the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid in a communication from the European Southern Observatory Eso, with whose instruments the observations were made . “There the iron hits much cooler environments, condenses and rains down.”
The planet with the catalog number Wasp-76b is almost twice the diameter of Jupiter, the largest planet in our system. It circles its home star so closely that it receives about a thousand times more radiation from it than the earth from the sun.
He always turns the same side to his star, just as the moon always shows the same side to the earth. As a result, it gets 2,400 degrees Celsius hot on the day side of the gas giant – temperatures at which metals evaporate.
It rains iron in the evening
On the everlasting night side, however, it is around 1,000 degrees cooler, as the scientists report. The astronomers examined the exotic gas giant with a special instrument on the “Very Large Telescope” of the Eso.
“The observations show that there is an abundance of iron vapor in the atmosphere on the hot day side of Wasp-76b,” emphasizes Zapatero Osorio.
There was also a strong iron signature in the evening zone, which separates the day and night sides of the planet and where it gets cooler. “You could say that it gets rainy on this planet in the evening, only that it rains iron,” explains Ehrenreich. However, it is always evening in the same region of the planet.
With the study, the scientists not only determined the large temperature differences between the two sides of the planet, but also demonstrated a different day and night chemistry, which leads to the iron rain.
These observations can also be carried out on other planets, as Ehrenreich emphasizes. “What we have now received is a completely new way of researching the climate of the most extreme exoplanets.” (ff / dpa)
Finnish scientists have discovered a new form of aurora borealis, better known as the Northern Lights. Hobby aurora hunters, who made their self-made photos available for research, helped. The new “Dune” polar light is in no way inferior to the previously known shape of the northern lights and shines just as beautifully in the night sky – just a little different.
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