![]() ![]() ![]() “We don’t understand the physics of clouds on other planets, but we know that they are a common phenomenon,” said Adina Feinstein, a University of Chicago graduate student and first author of the paper. The patchiness is interesting to scientists as they try to put together an understanding of how clouds on other planets might behave. It is also likely a “tidally locked” planet, meaning that one side of the planet is perpetually in nighttime and the other side perpetually in the daytime.Īt the band where the day and night side meet, one of the new studies reveals, there are scattered clouds-so that perhaps 60 to 70% of the sky is covered. ![]() Like Saturn, it is a gas giant, but it sits much closer to its star-making it much hotter. “Data like these are a game changer,” said Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who contributed to and helped coordinate the new research. The suite of discoveries is detailed in a set of five new scientific papers submitted for publication. The latest data also give a hint of how these clouds might look up close: broken up rather than a single, uniform blanket over the planet. While we already had isolated ingredients of this broiling-hot planet’s atmosphere, the new readings provide a full menu of atoms, molecules, and even signs of active chemistry and clouds. The telescope’s array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a star some 700 light-years away – known as WASP-39 b. Known for beaming stunning images back to Earth, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just scored another first: an incredibly detailed chemical portrait of a distant world’s skies-including what its clouds look like. ![]()
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