The confirmed number of exoplanets reached 5,000 in the year 2022, 30 years after the discovery of planets outside the solar system. These discoveries include a variety of distant planets, including a super-Earth, a gas giant like Jupiter, an ice giant like Neptune, and others.
According to the site,RT“Although planetary scientists have discovered thousands of these strange space worlds, it is likely that there are more than a trillion exoplanets in our Milky Way alone, and here, we present a number of recent discoveries of exoplanets that were announced in 2022..
A planet that hosts metal clouds and rains precious stones
Scientists recently found that airborne minerals and gemstones are most likely to be found on the cooler side of the Earth WASP-121 bIt is an exoplanet 855 light years from Earth.
There, it is cold enough for minerals in the high atmosphere — such as magnesium, iron, vanadium, chromium and nickel — to condense into clouds.
According to Thomas Mikal-Evans, astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and lead author of the research, these clouds can resemble dust storms on Earth. Some clouds may be colored blue or red, while others are gray or green. Sometimes, it can condense into drops, which ultimately means the gems are falling from the sky.
Alien planet in the shape of a rugby ball
Although most planets are spherical, WASP-103b not like that.
He found a telescope Cheops space, of the European Space Agency WASP-103-b – And it’s a planet twice the size of Jupiter – it’s not because it orbits its star in just one day. This causes severe distortion on the planet due to the gravitational influence it is exposed to due to its star.
Eventually, this gravitational pull deformed the spherical planet into a rugby ball-like shape.
Rare discovery on “Super Neptune”
About 150 light-years from Earth, astronomers discovered a “super-Neptune” (a planet slightly larger than Neptune) with water vapor in its atmosphere. This is rare.
And NASA wrote: “At 150 light-years away, that is TOI-674b Astronomically close, which is one of the reasons why scientists can derive the chemical composition of its atmosphere. Many questions remain, such as how much water vapor its atmosphere holds, but observing the atmosphere of TOI-674 b It is much easier than observing the atmospheres of many exoplanets, which makes it a prime target for deeper investigation“.
An exoplanet is still forming
Planetary scientists have discovered a giant exoplanet that is still forming AB Aurigae b.
The more than 30-year-old Hubble Space Telescope has imaged the planet, which is developing in a still young and volatile disk of gas and dust called a protoplanetary disk..
The age of the newborn star of the solar system is only two million years. (The Sun, for example, is more than 4.5 billion years old.).
And the new planet is gigantic. Scientists believe that it is nine times larger than Jupiter. It orbits far from its star, about 8.6 billion miles away. This is more than twice the distance that Pluto is from the sun.
And unlike most planets, which are thought to have formed when smaller objects in the planetary disk collided and grew into large, hot planetary bodies, it may be AB Aurigae b Formed when his cooled disc shattered into large pieces.
A massive ocean likely covers this entire exoplanet
A hundred light-years away in the universe, a sprawling ocean might be gushing over an entire distant planet.
And last August, astronomers announced that the exoplanet TOI-1452b Close to Earth in size and located in a region of its solar system where liquid water could exist, and vast amounts of water – many times the amount of water on Earth – could be responsible for the planet’s low density (as opposed to a world teeming with rocks and minerals)..
Scientists revealed that oceans could make up about 30 percent of Earth’s mass TOI-1452 b. For comparison, on Earth, water makes up only 1% of the planet’s mass.
A strange planet that looks like a marshmallow
Scientists find out TOI-3757 ba giant gas planet with the density of “marshmallows” or “marshmallows”, orbiting a cold red dwarf star located 580 light years from Earth.
The planet orbits a common, albeit intriguing type of star called a red dwarf. These stars are much smaller and less luminous than the Sun, but they are very fickle: they give off violent flares that can make nearby planets inhospitable..
An unprecedented discovery on a planet 700 light years away
Astronomers have found the outer planet WASP-39 b, a hot gas giant closely orbiting a star 700 light-years away. For the first time, they discovered a “full list” of atoms and molecules in the clouds of an exoplanet, some of which are interacting.
Starlight often fuels chemical reactions on a planet, a process called photochemistry. This is what happens on WASP-39 b.
“Planets are sculpted and transformed by spinning within the host star’s radiation bath,” Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who contributed to the new research, said in a statement. On Earth, these transitions allow life to flourish“.
It suggests a chemical stockpile of WASP-39 b A history of crashes and mergers of smaller bodies called planetesimals (planetesimals) to create the planet.
Evidence for the existence of “water worlds” in deep space
Scientists have discovered two “water worlds”, in the same solar system, that are believed to be teeming with water. Water can account for up to half of the mass of these planets.
These two watery worlds, which are unlike any planets seen in our solar system, are located in a planetary system located 218 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Lyre..
The two planets are given a name Kepler-138 c AndKepler-138 dnamed after the Kepler telescope (Kepler Space Telescope) of NASA, which has identified thousands of exoplanets and revolutionized our understanding of what lies beyond our solar system, in the deep universe.