Nearly 600 light-years from Earth, the exoplanet called WASP-62b whips around its host star at high speed. The planet is a hot Jupiter, and despite its gassy base, the atmosphere is completely cloudless, according to a study published this month in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
WASP-62b was first discovered in 2012 in a sweep with the Find a wide angle for planets Study south (hence the the acronym of the name). The study it detects exoplanets by seeing them as they pass in front of their host stars, causing a decrease in the brightness of the star’s glare.
“We can’t see these planets directly. It’s like looking at a street fireplace, ” Munazza Alam, astronaut at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Center and the paper’s lead author recently, she saidthe phone call. “We collect all this information about the planet’s atmosphere from what we call the observation of light together, which means that we are looking at the light both from the star and from the planet.”
Hot Jupiters are a class of exoplanets, named because they are gas giants (as our local Jupiter) that orbit close to their host stars so they are very hot. They are standing among super-Earths, mini-Neptunes, and a series of other types that attempt to account for exoplanets based on their bulk products in our local solar system. Due to the proximity of Jupiter to its host star, the exoplanets have very short orbital periods. If the WASP-62b orbit started Monday morning for Earth, it would be a year before you clocked out for the weekend.
Within the Milky Way, Alam said, hot Jupiters are rarer than smaller planets, thed among exoplanets, it is more common to find cloudy atmosphere. That makes this hot Jupiter something weird.
G / O Media may receive a commission
The team watched spectroscopic data collected with the Hubble Space Telescope that focused on the amounts of potassium and sodium in the atmosphere. None of the previous ones turned, however sodium was detected Sums were “whopping”, Alam said, suggesting the WASP-62b sentiment was clear with the weights Hubble found. The results make the planet the first Jupiter hot with a cloudless feel and just the second exoplanet with such a clear feel after Hot Saturn (WASP-96b) discovered in 2018. Both planets have that high sodium content, which is reflected in a tent-like peak in the data , which makes for cloudless clouds. stem giant.
Down the line, the team aims to study different atmospheric layers of that hot Jupiter Hubble is not to be found. Future observations of the exoplanet will be made with the future James Webb space telescope, which will be able to see in near infrared.
“Kepler showed us that there are thousands of planets out there, and TESS is doing that too in different parts of the sky,” Alam said. “We discovered thousands of smaller planets, which is dramatically changing the demographics of the planet’s population as we once knew it. ”