Astronomers spotted bizarre ‘Jupiter’ with four-day year

Nearly 600 lightsyears from Earth, the exoplanet known as WASP-62b is whipping its host star at a breakneck pace. The planet is a hot Jupiter, and despite its gaseous constitution, its atmosphere is completely cloudless., according to a study published this month in the letters of the astrophysical journal.

WASP-62b was first detected in 2012 in a sweep by the Wide angle search of planets Southern survey (hence the acronym in his name). The poll detects exoplanets by spotting them as they pass in front of their host stars, causing the star’s brightness to drop.

“We can’t actually see these planets directly. It’s like looking at a firefly next to a street light, ” Munazza Alam, Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Astrophysics Center and main author of the recent article, stated that Ia phonecall. “We glean all of this information about the planet’s atmosphere from what we call combined light observations, which means we are looking at the light from both the star and the planet.”

Hot Jupiters are a class of exoplanets, named because they are gas giants (like our local Jupiter) this orbit close to their host stars and are therefore quite warm. They stand among super-earths, mini-Neptunes, and a bunch of other classifications that seek to describe exoplanets based on their archetypes in our local solar system. Because of the proximity of a hot Jupiter to its host star, exoplanets have extremely short orbital periods. If WASP-62b’s orbit started on a Monday morning for Earth, its year would be over before you clocked in for the weekend.

In the Milky Way, Alam says, hot Jupiters are rarer than small planets, ad among exoplanets, it is more common to find cloudy atmospheres. It makes this hot Jupiter a little weird.

The team watched spectroscopic data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope which focused on the amounts of potassium and sodium in the atmosphere. None of the first came, but sodium has been detected in “Enormous” amounts, Alam said, suggesting that the atmosphere of WASP-62b was clear at the pressures detected by Hubble. Results make the planet the first hot Jupiter with a cloudless atmosphere and only the second exoplanet with such a clear atmosphere after a hot Saturn (WASP-96b) detected in 2018. Both planets have this significant sodium content, which appears in a tent-shaped peak in the data, which makes it a The gas giant.

Down the line, the team aims to probe different atmospheric layers of hot Jupiter which are not detectable by Hubble. Future observations of the exoplanet will be made with the next James Webb Space Telescope, who will be able to see in the near infrared.

“Kepler has shown us that there are thousands of planets out there, and TESS does it in different parts of the sky as well,” Alam said. “We have found thousands of smaller planets, which is really changing the demographics of the planet’s population as we know it.