Planets discovered in 2022.. “Rugby ball, marshmallow and aquatic worlds”

Over the course of a 30-year search for planets outside the solar system, the confirmed number of these worlds has reached 5,000 in 2022, and these discoveries include a variety of distant planets, including a super-Earth, a gas giant like Jupiter , a giant ice planet like Neptune and others.

Although planetary scientists have discovered thousands of these strange alien worlds, there are likely more than a trillion exoplanets in our Milky Way alone.

Here we present a series of recent exoplanet discoveries announced in 2022.

A planet that harbors metal clouds and rains precious stones

Scientists recently discovered that airborne minerals and gems are likely to be on the cooler side of WASP-121 b, an exoplanet 855 light-years from Earth.

There, it’s cold enough for minerals in the upper atmosphere — such as magnesium, iron, vanadium, chromium and nickel — to condense into clouds.

According to Thomas Mikal-Evans, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and lead author of the research, these clouds may resemble dust storms on Earth. Some clouds may be colored blue or red, while others are gray or green. Sometimes, it can condense into drops which ultimately means that the gems are falling from the sky.

Alien planet in the shape of a rugby ball

While most planets are spherical, WASP-103b is not.

The European Space Agency’s Cheops space telescope has discovered that WASP-103-b – a planet twice the size of Jupiter – is not because it orbits its star in a single day. This causes a severe distortion on the planet due to the gravitational influence it is exposed to due to its star.

Eventually, this gravitational pull warped the spherical planet into a rugby ball-like shape.

Rare find on “Super Neptune”

About 150 light-years from Earth, astronomers have discovered a “super-Neptune” (a planet slightly larger than Neptune) with water vapor in its atmosphere. This is rare.

NASA wrote, “At 150 light-years away, TOI-674 b is astronomically close, which is one reason scientists can derive the chemical makeup of its atmosphere. Many questions remain, such as how much water vapor which contains its atmosphere, but observing TOI-674 b’s atmosphere is much easier to observe than the atmospheres of many exoplanets, making it a prime target for further investigations.”

An exoplanet is still forming

Planetary scientists have discovered a giant exoplanet still forming, called AB Aurigae b.

The more than 30-year-old Hubble Space Telescope photographed the planet, which is developing into a still young, volatile disk of gas and dust called a protoplanetary disk.

The age of the newborn star of the solar system is only two million years. (The Sun, for example, is more than 4.5 billion years old.)

And the new planet is gigantic. Scientists believe it is nine times larger than Jupiter. It orbits far from its star, about 8.6 billion miles away. This is more than double the distance Pluto is from the sun.

Unlike most planets, which are thought to have formed when smaller objects in the planetary disk collided and grew into large hot planetesimals, AB Aurigae b probably formed when its cooling disk shattered into large pieces.

A huge ocean probably covers the entire exoplanet

A hundred light-years away in the universe, a vast ocean could well up on an entire distant planet.

And last August, astronomers announced that the exoplanet TOI-1452 b is close to the size of Earth and located in a region of its solar system where liquid water and massive amounts of water could exist — many times the amount of water. on Earth – may be responsible for the planet’s low density (unlike the world, which is teeming with rocks and minerals).

Scientists have revealed that oceans could make up about 30% of the mass of TOI-1452 b. For comparison, on Earth, water makes up only 1% of the planet’s mass.

A strange planet that looks like a marshmallow

Scientists have discovered TOI-3757 b, a gas giant with a marshmallow density, orbiting a cold red dwarf located 580 light-years from Earth.

The planet orbits a common, albeit intriguing, type of star called a red dwarf. These stars are much smaller and dimmer than the Sun, but they are very fickle: they emit violent flares that can make nearby planets inhospitable.

An unprecedented discovery on a planet 700 light years away

Astronomers have found the exoplanet WASP-39 b, a hot gas giant orbiting a star 700 light-years away. For the first time, they have discovered a ‘complete list’ of atoms and molecules in an exoplanet’s clouds, some of which interact.

Starlight often fuels chemical reactions on a planet, a process called photochemistry. This is what happens on WASP-39 b.

“Planets are sculpted and transformed by rotation within the radiation bath of the host star,” Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who contributed to the new research, said in a statement. “On Earth, these transformations allow life to thrive”.

The chemical inventory of WASP-39b suggests a history of accidents and mergers of smaller bodies called planetesimals to create the planet.

Evidence for the existence of “water worlds” in deep space

Scientists have discovered two “water worlds” in the same solar system that are believed to be teeming with water. Water can account for up to half the mass of these planets.

These two watery worlds, which are unlike any planets seen in our solar system, are located in a planetary system located 218 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra.

The two planets are named Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d, after NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which has identified thousands of exoplanets and revolutionized our understanding of what lies beyond our solar system, in the deep universe.