Telescope discovery reveals secrets of distant planet that lost its atmosphere and is back

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope discovered a distant planet outside the solar system that lost its atmosphere billions of years ago, but then acquired a second layer thanks to volcanic activity, where the planet GJ 1132 b would have started as a gaseous world, similar to Jupiter or Saturn but smaller than Neptune, with a dense hydrogen atmosphere.

According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, it quickly lost the primitive atmosphere of hydrogen and helium during the first 100 million years of the planet’s formation due to intense radiation from its hot, rotating host star. around it once every 1.6 days. This left him with a similar “open heart” for the size of Earth, but without an atmosphere, but astronomers say he developed a second atmosphere due to volcanic activity on the surface of the now rocky world.

The team from NASA and the University of Cambridge used Hubble and computer modeling to explore how the atmosphere was first lost and then restored, and recent observations of the planet, first discovered in 2015 , revealed more details about its atmosphere, including that it contains oil haze, similar to what can be seen on Earth after smog.

The team reports that the atmosphere is made up of molecules of hydrogen, hydrogen cyanide and methane, and that it also contains haze, and modeling suggests that aerosol haze is dependent on photosynthetic hydrocarbons, similar to Earth smog, and probably the result of volcanic activity.

This second atmosphere, which continues to infiltrate into space, is constantly replenished from the reservoir of hydrogen in the magma of the mantle.

Cambridge University team member Paul Rimer explained that this second atmosphere comes from the surface and interior of the planet, and therefore it is a window into the geology of another world.

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