Almost 600 lightsa few years from Earth, the exoplanet known as WASP-62b beats around 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 Astrophysical Journal Letters.
WASP-62b was first detected in 2012 in a broom of Wide angle search for planets Probes south (from here acronym in his name). The study detects exoplanets by observing them as they pass in front of the host stars, causing a dip in the brightness of the star’s radiance.
“In fact, we cannot see these planets directly. It’s like looking at a firefly next to a lantern. “ Munazza Alam, Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Center for Astrophysics and the lead author of the recent paper, said ia phone call. “We gather all this information about the planet’s atmosphere from what we call combined observations of light, which means we look at both the light of the star and 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 and so are quite hot. They stand among super-Earths, mini-Neptune, and a number of other classifications that try to describe exoplanets based on their archetypes in our local solar system. Due to the approach of a hot Jupiter to the host star, the exoplanets have extremely short orbital periods. If the WASP-62b orbit started Monday morning for Earth, its year would be over before you were on the weekend.
In the Milky Way, Alam said, hot Jupiters are rarer than smaller planets, yeard among exoplanets, it is more common cloudy atmospheres. That makes this hot Jupiter a little weird.
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The team looked spectroscopic data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope, which focused on the amounts of potassium and sodium in the atmosphere. None of the first appeared, however sodium was detected in “Huge,” Alam said, suggesting that the WASP-62b atmosphere was clear at the pressures detected by Hubble. The 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 that significant sodium content, which appears at a peak similar to the data tents, which make a giant gas cloud .
Along the line, the team aims to explore different atmospheric layers of hot Jupiter are not detectable by Hubble. Future observations of the exoplanet will be made with the next one James Webb Space Telescope, who will be able to see in the near infrared.
“Kepler has shown us that there are thousands of planets there and TESS does that in different parts of the sky,” Alam said. “We found thousands of smaller planets, which really changes the demographics of the planet’s population as we knew it. ”