Scientists discover cloudless ‘hot Jupiter’ exoplanet with four-day year

Astronomers have discovered another strange planet that could expand our understanding of the cosmos. Gizmodo reports that a team from Harvard and Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics spotted a gas giant 575 light-years away, WASP-62b, which is not just in an extremely close 4.5-day orbit (making it a “Hot Jupiter”), but has no clouds. This is only the second time that a researcher has found a cloudless exoplanet, and it is believed to be rare overall – less than 7% of exoplanets.

Scientists first detected WASP-62b in 2012, but only recently were they able to study its atmosphere. Study leader Munazza Alam used spectroscopic observation from the Hubble Space Telescope to discover the strong presence of sodium, an element that would be obscured if there were clouds in the planet’s atmosphere. Astronomers usually get only small clues of the presence of sodium, so it was “smoking evidence” of a cloudless planet, according to Alam.