While the LTT 9779b is unusual, one thing is for sure: people won’t like it there. However, our Spitzer observations show its atmosphere through the infrared light that the planet emits.” “This planet is so intensely irradiated by a star that its temperature is over 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, and its atmosphere should have completely evaporated. “This is the first time we’ve measured the light emanating from this planet, which shouldn’t be,” said Ian Crossfield, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California and lead author of the paper. The article details the first spectral signature of any planet’s atmosphere discovered by TESS, the first global temperature map of any planet TESS with an atmosphere and hot Neptune, whose emission spectrum is fundamentally different from many of the larger “hot Jupiters” previously studied. The results concerning the recently discovered planet LTT 9779b were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. It measured the reflectiveness of LTT9779b by comparing the light before and after the exoplanet disappeared behind its star.(ORDO NEWS) - The team, led by an astronomer from the University of Kansas, collected data from NASA‘s TESS and Spitzer space telescopes to display the atmosphere of a highly unusual exoplanet dubbed “hot Neptune” for the first time. The European Space Agency's Cheops space telescope was launched into Earth's orbit in 2019 on a mission to investigate planets discovered outside our Solar System. The research marks "a big milestone" because it shows how a Neptune-sized planet could survive in the Neptune desert, he added. "It's a bit like a shield, like in those old Star Trek films where they have shields around their ships," he told AFP. The planet's metallic clouds "act like a mirror," reflecting away light and preventing the atmosphere from being blown away, according to the European Space Agency's Cheops project scientist Maximilian Guenther. "We expect planets like this to have their atmosphere blown away by their star, leaving behind bare rock." "It's a planet that shouldn't exist," Parmentier said. The only exoplanets previously found that orbit their stars in less than 24 hours are either gas giants 10 times bigger than Earth - or rocky planets half its size.īut LTT9779b lives in a region called the "Neptune desert", where planets its size are not supposed to be found. The planet, which is around five times the size of Earth, is an outlier in other ways. Like running hot water steams up a bathroom, a scorching stream of metal and silicate - the stuff of which glass is made - oversaturated LTT9779b's atmosphere until metallic clouds formed, he said. The researchers then "realised we should think about this cloud formation in the same way as condensation forming in a bathroom after a hot shower," he said in a statement. "It was really a puzzle," said Vivien Parmentier, a researcher at France's Cote d'Azur Observatory and co-author of a new study in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. That makes it the first exoplanet comparably shiny as Venus, which is the brightest object in our night sky other than the Moon.įirst discovered in 2020, the Neptune-sized planet called LTT9779b orbits its star in just 19 hours.īecause it is so close, the side of the planet facing its star is a sizzling 2,000 degrees Celsius, which is considered far too hot for clouds to form. This strange world, which is more than 260 light years from Earth, reflects 80 percent of the light from its host star, according to new observations from Europe's exoplanet-probing Cheops space telescope.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |