The Hubble Space Telescope has been in the air for 32 years and has only gotten better as it continues to study the Universe and teach us more about our place in the universe. Hubble studies our own solar system, as well as the other planets in the universe. Hubble has been hard at work on this last subject.
In two papers published in Nature and Astrophysical Journal Letters, teams of Hubble astronomer are reporting on strange weather conditions on two hot Jupiters, WASP-178b and KELT-20b. The Nature study describes raining rock on WASP-178b, while the Astrophysical Journal Letters study discusses how KELT-20b has its upper atmosphere getting hotter than cooler because it is being Sunburned.
David Sing, co-author of both studies, said that they still don't have a good understanding of weather in different planetary environments. When you go to a distant exoplanet, you don't have a general theory about how the atmosphere goes together and responds to extreme conditions. You don't know how it will manifest in complex ways even though you know basic chemistry and physics.
The WASP-178b is 1,300 light-years away from Earth. The atmosphere is cloudless on the daytime side. Because one side of the planet faces its star, the atmosphere whips around to the other side at high speeds. The planet is hot enough to cause rock to fall out of clouds, but it is dark enough to keep the Silicon monoxide out.
If we can figure out what's happening on super-hot Jupiters, that will pave the way to better understanding the atmospheres of potentially inhabited planets.
Jupiters are hot.
Hot Jupiters are planets that are similar to Jupiter but are much closer to their parent star than Jupiter is. Most hot Jupiters can be found at a temperature of 1650C (3000F). This is hot enough to kill most metals, as hot Jupiters have the hottest planetary atmospheres ever seen. One in 10 stars are estimated to have a hot Jupiter, which is a unique feature about hot Jupiters, as they are not existing in our solar system. The first discovery of an exoplanet around a Sun-like star was a hot Jupiter. Two planet-sized bodies were found to be in the same region.
The Hubble Space Telescope.
Hubble has been in space for 32 years and continues to teach us about our place in the universe. Hubble was named after an American astronomer who discovered the expansion of the Universe in the 1920s. The telescope bearing the famous astronomer's name has made more than one million observations. The most distant star ever detected in outer space was imaged by Hubble.
The Hubble telescope's days in space won't last forever because of the recent launch and no scheduled servicing missions. Hubble is on its last legs and is experiencing software failures, another sign that it could last until the end of the decade. What future discoveries could it make about our universe? This is why we science, because only time will tell.
As always, keep doing science and looking up.
NASA, Space.com, and Nature are some of the sources.
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