In the last decade, we have become good at identifying planets outside our solar system. Over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets were discovered recently. Most of these detections tell us little about the planets we have identified, such as their mass or size.
Learning more about these planets and their atmospheres is the next step in exoplanet research. This is one of the major aims of the James Webb Space Telescope when it is ready for science this summer, but in the meantime, researchers are getting creative to answer these questions. Astronomers using data from the Hubble Space Telescope investigated 25 exoplanets to find out about their atmospheres.
Thanks to a decade of intense observing campaigns, we learned a lot about the chemistry and formation of 25 exoplanets.
Hot Jupiters are planets that are roughly the size of Jupiter and they are very close to their host stars. The team looked for hydrogen ion and metal oxides in the atmospheres of the planets to learn more about how the planets formed. They looked at eclipses and transits when the exoplanet passed behind its star, as well as 600 hours of Hubble observations.
They could learn about correlations between atmospheric composition and other qualities, such as whether they showed thermal inversion, where an atmosphere gets hotter at higher altitudes. The hottest exoplanets had temperatures over 2,000 kelvin. The researchers noted that there were hydrogen ion, titanium oxide, vanadium oxide, or iron hydride in almost all of the hot atmospheres.
The research shows how large amounts of data can be used to look for large-scale trends in exoplanets. Predicting what other exoplanets might be like is useful.
Many issues such as the origins of the water on Earth, the formation of the Moon, and the different evolutionary histories of Earth and Mars are still unsolved despite our ability. Large exoplanet population studies aim to understand the general processes.
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