Since astronomers began searching for exoplanets in the 1990s, they have seen a number of hot Jupiters, and now NASA’s most prestigious telescope is playing the meteorologist.
These giant planets are as gaseous as Jupiter itself but their parent stars are much more intimate – their skin can almost be boiled at a temperature of over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit ( 1,600 degrees Celsius). What, you Hubble Space Telescope it has penetrated the screens of the other hot Jupiters, seeing a different kind, at least in the natural conditions of our planet. Solar system. These worlds are beyond comprehension; They show that stars can damage Earth’s atmosphere.
“But we don’t really know the universe in different planetary forms,” said David Sing, author on papers describing the two planets and an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Placed somewhere To say published by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which uses Hubble.
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“When you look at the Earth, all of our predictions are closely tied to what we can measure,” Sing said. Not so on an exoplanet, he knew. “Even though you know basic chemistry and physics, you don’t know how to express it in complex ways.”
One of Hubble’s targets is KELT-20b, a hot Jupiter about 400 light-years away. Earth described in the paper printed and Astrophysical Journal Letters in January. Here, Hubble observed a demonstration of the melting of ultraviolet from the rising sun to hit the Earth’s atmosphere, where metals bake.
The result is a very hot plate in the atmosphere of KELT -20b – as the stratosphere shields the Earth’s sun, it gets much hotter.
“So far, we don’t know what the impact of the astronomical star will be on the Earth’s atmosphere. There have been a lot of speculations, but so far we have the first known data,” Guangwei Fu said. , an astronomy graduate student at the University of Maryland and one of those papers. writers, spoken in the language. “This is an important demonstration that the planets are not isolated but connected by their host stars.”
But KELT-20b is much better than that found by Hubble in WASP-178b, which is about 1,300 lighter years old and described in a paper. printed (opens on new page) Wednesday (April 6) in Nature.
In this world, it rains rocks.
More rain comes because one part of the earth is constantly exposed to the sun, which melts the rocks and produces silicon monoxide gas. That silicon monoxide flows to the dark side of the earth (at speeds greater than 2,000 mph or 3,200 kph, no less), where the temperature cools to re -seal material in the rocks. fall back up.
To astronomers, these other worlds are more than knowledge. The findings show that innovators can give scientists insight into the rise of other planets – something that will help them see hellish worlds, more like Earth.
“If we can’t figure out what’s going on on the super-hot Jupiters, where we have solid observational data, we can’t see what’s going on in the weak spectra. from looking at terrestrial exoplanets, ” Joshua Lothringeran astrologer at the University of Utah Valley and one of the authors of the two papers, spoken in the same language.
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