• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

JWST Spots Hot Gritty Silicate Clouds On Nearby Exoplanet Orbiting Two Stars

March 23, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

New observations from JWST have revealed intriguing details of the atmosphere of a relatively nearby exoplanet. The world is called VHS 1256 b and orbits not one but two stars. The system is located 40 light-years away and is an ideal target for JWST.

VHS 1256 b is the planetary-mass object with the biggest change in brightness to date. The observations from JWST suggest that silicate material is constantly being churned over the course of the planet’s 22-hour rotation, reaching a scorching 830 °C (1,500 °F) at the top of the atmosphere.

Advertisement

It’s not just clouds made of a sand-like material – JWST also got clear detections of water, methane, and carbon monoxide. There is also evidence for the presence of carbon dioxide. So far, this is the highest number of molecules spotted in the atmosphere of a planet beyond the solar system.

“VHS 1256 b is about four times farther from its stars than Pluto is from our Sun, which makes it a great target for the JWST,” lead author Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona, said in a statement. “That means the planet’s light is not mixed with light from its stars.”

This celestial body is truly a complicated one. With a mass around 12 or 16 times that of Jupiter, this object is around the lower end of the brown dwarf mass scale. Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that failed to become stars, never massive enough to fuse regular hydrogen. They can fuse a heavier version of hydrogen known as deuterium, but it is not clear if this is the case here.

The high temperature of the object, despite being so far from its two stars, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fusing something at its core. VHS 1256 b is only 140 million years old. When gas giant planets form, they tend to be quite hot. The gas from the protoplanetary nebula is compressed and the gravitational potential energy is converted into heat.

Advertisement

Both brown dwarfs and massive planets can have weird weather phenomena, including the clouds spotted around this world. JWST was able to deliver such detailed observations that researchers could tell that there are different types of grains in the clouds.

Graphic titled “Exoplanet VHS 1256 b Emission Spectrum.” The label at top right reads NIRSpec and MIRI, IFU Medium-Resolution Spectroscopy. The spectrum is plotted on a graph with y- and x-axes. The graph shows jagged lines. There are labels for water, carbon monoxide, methane, and silicates

The emission spectrum of the planet allowed researchers to spot all the different molecules. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI), B. Miles (University of Arizona), S. Hinkley (University of Exeter), B. Biller (University of Edinburgh), A. Skemer (University of California, Santa Cruz)

“The smaller silicate grains in its atmosphere may be more like tiny particles as in smoke,” added co-author Beth Biller of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “The larger grains might be more like very hot, very small sand particles.”

These observations were part of the Early Release Science Programme, and they are just the beginning of the study of this fascinating celestial body.

“We’ve isolated silicates, but better understanding which grain sizes and shapes match specific types of clouds is going to take a lot of additional work,” co-author Elisabeth Matthews from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, explained. “This is not the final word on this planet – it is only the beginning of a large-scale modeling effort to understand JWST’s complex data.”

Advertisement

The study is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Poland condemns jailing of Belarus protest leaders
  2. China energy crunch triggers alarm, pleas for more coal
  3. China proposes adding cryptocurrency mining to ‘negative list’ of industries
  4. Stranded Dolphins’ Brains Show Signs Of Alzheimer’s-Like Disease

Source Link: JWST Spots Hot Gritty Silicate Clouds On Nearby Exoplanet Orbiting Two Stars

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • If Deep-Sea Pressure Can Crush A Human Body, How Do Deep-Sea Creatures Not Implode?
  • Meet Ned: The Lonely Lefty Snail Looking For Love
  • “America Will Lead The Next Giant Leap”: NASA Announces New Milestone In Hunt For Exoplanets
  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version