A team of astronomers has mapped for the first time the structure of the atmosphere of a 3D planet and has discovered that it has three layers: one with winds loaded with iron, another intermediate with a very rapid stream current that carries sodium, and a superior of hydrogen winds.
This intricate climate pattern that had never been seen on any planet.
In addition, one side of the planet is scorching, since he is always looking towards the star, while the other is much colder.
The study of this exoplanet, which has been done by combining the four units of the Vray Lark Telescolpe (VLT) telescope of the European Observatory Austral (ESO), opens the door to more detailed studies of the chemical composition and the climate of other worlds.
“The atmosphere of this planet behaves in ways that challenge our understanding of how the weather works, not only on Earth, but on all the planets. It seems taken from science fiction, ”said Julia Victoria Seidel, a researcher at ESO in Chile and the main author of the study.
The planet wasp-121b (also called Tylos) is about 900 light years away, in the constellation of Puppis, and is an ultra-scracked jupiter, a gas giant that orbits around its host star so close that a year there lasts only a few a few 30 terrestrial hours.
The study, whose details have been published on Tuesday in the journal Nature, has had the participation of scientists from the Astrobiology Center (CAB), the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, and the Institute of Particle Physics and the Cosmos of the University Complutense from Madrid, in Spain.
A jet of air
The team has studied the depths of the Tylos atmosphere creating a map in three dimensions of the atmosphere structure that has allowed for the first time the astronomical community to have been able to study the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system in so much detail.
“What we saw was surprising: a stream current turns the material around the planet’s Ecuador, while a separate flow at the lowest levels of the atmosphere moves the gas on the hot side to the coldest side. This type of weather has not been seen before on any planet, ”said Seidel.
The observed jet current extends in the middle of the planet, gaining speed and violently stirring the upper atmosphere as it crosses the hot side of Tylos.
“In comparison, even the strongest hurricanes of the solar system seem calm,” added the researcher.
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Combine signals to analyze the exoplanet
To reveal the three -dimensional structure of the exoplanet atmosphere, the team used the ESO VLT espresso to combine the light of its four large telescope units in a single signal and thus collect four times more light than with a single unit of Individual telescope.
When observing the planet during a complete traffic against its host star, Espresso could detect firms of multiple chemical elements, as a result, the different layers of the atmosphere.
“The VLT allowed us to probe three different layers of the atmosphere of the exoplanet at once,” said Leonardo A. Dos Santos, of the Institute of Space Telescope Sciences in Baltimore (EU) and co -author of the work.
Presence of titanium
In addition, in a complementary study published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the authors have revealed the presence of titanium just below the stream in jet, a finding that was a surprise since in previous observations it had never been detected (possibly because the titanium is hidden in the depths of the atmosphere).
“It is really amazing that we can study details such as the chemical composition and the climatic patterns of a planet at such a large distance,” said Bibiana Prinoth, a doctoral student at the University of Lund (Sweden) and that, and co -author of Nature’s article .
But to discover the atmosphere of smaller planets, similar to the earth, larger telescopes will be needed such as Extreme Large Telescope (elt) of ESO, currently under construction in Chile.
The ELT will change the rules of the game for the study of the atmospheres of the exoplanets, ”concluded Prinoth.
With EFE information.
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