As its silicate clouds billow, temperatures reach 830 degrees Celsius. 40 light years away from Earth, a strange planet was detected by the James Webb telescope, whose atmosphere is constantly rising, mixing and moving during its 22-hour day.
named as VHS 1256 bits orbit revolves around not one, but two stars over a period of 10,000 years.
“VHS 1256 b is about four times farther from its stars than Pluto is from our Sun, making it an excellent target for Webb,” project leader Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona said in a statement.
NASA.
The team led by Miles also made clear detections of water, methane and carbon monoxide with Webb’s data. In addition, he found evidence of carbon dioxide.
This is the largest number of molecules ever identified at one time on a planet outside of our own. solar system. Within those clouds, Webb detected larger and smaller silicate dust grains, shown in a spectrum.
“The finer silicate grains in its atmosphere might look more like tiny smoke particles,” said co-author Beth Biller, of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
VHS 1256 b has low gravity compared to more massive brown dwarfs, which means that its silicate clouds can appear and linger higher in its atmosphere, where Webb can detect them.
“This is not the last word on this planet, it is the beginning of a large-scale modeling effort to adjust to the complex Webb dataMiles said.
Pause. Rewind. @NASAWebb may have found sand particles in the atmosphere of planet VHS 1256 b, which orbits a pair of stars 40 light-years away. Webb also detected water, carbon monoxide, and methane. Get the gritty details: https://t.co/nP827gQKYW pic.twitter.com/0CZxA9Doxw
— NASA (@NASA) March 22, 2023
Although all of the features the team observed have been detected by others telescopes on other planets at different locations in the Milky Way, the other research teams generally identified only one feature at a time.
“No other telescope has identified so many features at once for a single target,” said co-author Andrew Skemer of the University of California.
The researchers observed VHS 1256 b as part of Webb’s First Science Observations program, which is designed to help transform the astronomical community’s ability to characterize planets and the disks where they form.
The results were published in the magazine The Astrophysical Journal Letters.