Spying on planets outside the Solar System
NASA scientists have managed to see planets around other stars with enough detail to work out what they’re made of.
NASA pointed its Spitzer Space Telescope at two gas giant exoplanets in the Vulpecula and Pegasus constellations, 370 and 904 trillion miles away, for long enough that detailed measurements of the infrared spectrum of light reflected by the plant could be made.
In a paper published in this week’s Nature, the team based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena report two surprises from the data. First, the snappily named HD 209458b and HD 189733b seem much drier than calculations predicted…
Happily, the second surprise provided an answer to the conundrum. The spectrum from HD 209458b revealed that the water could be being masked by the planet’s upper atmosphere, which is thick with dusts clouds formed from tiny silicate particles similar to sand. Nothing similar to the clouds is present in our solar system.
(From The Register.)
pax et bonum
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