Nearly 600 light - year from Earth , the exoplanet known as WASP-62b whip around its host star at a breakneck pace . The planet is a hot Jupiter , and despite its colicky organization , its atmosphere is altogether cloudless , concord to a studypublishedthis month in the Astrophysical Journal Letters .
WASP-62b was first discover in 2012 in a sweep by theWide Angle Search for PlanetsSouth survey ( hence the acronym in its name ) . The sight detect exoplanets by spot them as they happen in front of their host hotshot , get a free fall in the brightness of the star ’s radiancy .
“ We ca n’t actually see these planets flat . It ’s like looking at a firefly next to a streetlamp , ” Munazza Alam , an astronomer at the Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead source of the recent paper , said in a phone call . “ We ’re gleaning all this info about the planet ’s atmosphere from what we call combined light reflection , mean we ’re looking at the twinkle from both the champion and the planet . ”
A new study describes a cloudless, Jupiter-like exoplanet.Illustration: M. Weiss/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Hot Jupiters are a division of exoplanets , named because they are gas giants ( like our local Jupiter ) that orb close to their legion stars and thus are quite red-hot . They stand up amongsuper - earth , mini - Neptunes , and a slew of other classifications that seek to describe exoplanets base on their archetypes in our local solar organisation . As a solvent of a spicy Jupiter ’s propinquity to its host star , the exoplanets have extremely brusk orbital periods . If WASP-62b ’s orbit began on a Monday morning for Earth , its year would be over before you time out for the weekend .
Within the Milky Way , Alam articulate , hot Jupiters are uncommon than smaller satellite , and among exoplanets , it ’s more coarse to encounter nebulous atmosphere . That make this hot Jupiter a bit of an oddball .
The squad looked at spectroscopic data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope that focalise on amount of atomic number 19 and sodium in the atmosphere . None of the former turned up , but sodium was detected in “ whopping ” quantity , Alam said , paint a picture that the atmosphere of WASP-62b was cleared at the pressures detected by Hubble . The results make the major planet the first hot Jupiter with a cloud - complimentary atmosphere and only the 2nd exoplanet with such a clear atmosphere after a hot Saturn ( WASP-96b ) detected in 2018 . Both planet have that significant sodium content , which appears in a collapsible shelter - like peak in the data , that make for a cloud - free throttle giant .
https://gizmodo.com/on-this-salty-saturn-like-exoplanet-the-forecast-alwa-1825834972
Down the demarcation , the team point to probe different atmospheric bed of the hot Jupiter that are not perceptible by Hubble . Future observation of the exoplanet will be done with the upcomingJames Webb Space Telescope , which will be able to see in near - infrared .
“ Kepler showed us that there are thou of planet out there , and TESS is doing that as well in different parts of the sky , ” Alam said . “ We found thousands of smaller planet , which is really changing the demographic of the planet population as we knew it . ”
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