NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)
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Illustration of a superheated Jupiter, KELT-20b, located about 400 light-years away.
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Nationalgeographic.co.id – In studying a unique class of ‘ultra-hot exoplanets,’ NASA Hubble Space Telescope astronomers may be interested in dancing to Calypso’s party song “Hot, Hot, Hot.” That’s because these bloated Jupiter-sized worlds are so close to their host stars that they are roasted at boiling temperatures above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot enough to vaporize most metals, including titanium. This also causes them to have the hottest planetary atmospheres ever seen.
In two new papers, a team of Hubble astronomers have reported strange weather conditions on this sizzling world. There is a rain of vaporized rock on one planet, and on another its upper atmosphere becomes hotter than colder as it is “sunburned” by the star’s intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation.
This research goes beyond just discovering the planet’s strange and unique atmospheres. Studying extreme weather gives astronomers a better insight into the diversity, complexity, and exotic chemistry that occurs in very distant worlds throughout our galaxy.
“We still don’t have a good understanding of the weather in different planetary environments,” said David Sing of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, a member of the co-author of the two studies reported. Tech Explorist. “When you look at Earth, all of our weather predictions are still adjusted to what we can measure. But when you go to a distant exoplanet, you have limited predictive power because you haven’t built a general theory of how everything in the atmosphere works together and respond to extreme conditions. Even if you know basic chemistry and physics, you don’t know how it will manifest in complex ways.”
In a paper published in the journal Nature On April 6, 2022, entitled “UV absorption by silicate cloud precursors in ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-178b”, astronomers described Hubble’s observations of WASP-178b, which lies about 1,300 light-years away.
On the daytime side the atmosphere is cloudless, and is enriched with silicon monoxide gas. Because one side of the planet is permanently facing its star, the scorching atmosphere is rotating to the night side at superstorm speeds exceeding 2,000 miles per hour. On the dark side, silicon monoxide may be cold enough to condense into rock that sends rain from clouds, but even at dawn and dusk, the planet is hot enough to vaporize rock. “We knew we had seen something very interesting with this silicon monoxide feature,” said Josh Lothringer of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
M. Kornmesser / ESO
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Illustration of WASP-19b, in which atmospheric astronomers detect titanium oxide for the first time. WASP-19b’s atmosphere is estimated to have a temperature of around 2,000 degrees Celsius.
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While other papers published in Astrophysical Journal Letters the January 24, 2022 issue entitled “Strong H2O and CO Emission Features in the Spectrum of KELT-20b Driven by Stellar UV Irradiation”, Guangwei Fu of the University of Maryland, College Park, reports on a superheated Jupiter, KELT-20b, located about 400 years ago. light away.
On this planet, the explosion of ultraviolet light from its parent star creates a thermal layer in the atmosphere, much like Earth’s stratosphere. “Until now we never knew how the host star directly affects the planet’s atmosphere. There are many theories, but now we have the first observational data,” said Fu.
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In comparison, on Earth, ozone in the atmosphere absorbs UV rays and raises the temperature in the layer between 7 and 31 miles above the Earth’s surface. On KELT-20b UV radiation from the star heats the metal in the atmosphere which creates a very strong thermal inversion layer.
Evidence comes from Hubble’s detection of water in near-infrared observations, and from the detection of carbon monoxide by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. They radiate through the hot, transparent upper atmosphere generated by the inversion layer. This signature is unique from what astronomers see in Jupiter’s atmosphere orbiting cooler stars, such as our Sun. “The emission spectrum for KELT-20b is very different from hot jupiter others,” said Fu. “This is strong evidence that this planet does not live in isolation but is influenced by its host star.”
Although superheated Jupiter is uninhabitable, research of this kind helps pave the way for better understanding the atmospheres of potentially habitable terrestrial planets. “If we can’t figure out what’s happening to the superheated Jupiter for which we have solid observational data, we won’t have a chance of knowing what’s happening in the weaker spectrum from observing terrestrial exoplanets,” Lothringer said. “This is a test of our engineering that allows us to build a general understanding of physical properties such as cloud formation and atmospheric structure.”
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