2022 is a historic year for the discovery of new and wonderful worlds, as the number of planets discovered by NASA has exceeded 5,000 confirmed exoplanets.
Strange worlds outside our solar system, including a variety of distant planets, including rocky planets, gas giants like Jupiter, or ice giants like Neptune.
And although planetary scientists have discovered thousands of these strange places, there are likely more than a trillion exoplanets in our Milky Way alone.
Next year, the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful telescope ever built, will look into the atmospheres of some of these planets, giving scientists unprecedented insights into these largely enigmatic celestial bodies.
Here are some of the latest discoveries, made so far in 2022:
Planet of metal clouds and rain of gems
Planetary scientists have discovered many more distant exoplanets by pointing specialized telescopes, such as NASA’s legendary Kepler telescope, at distant stars and looking for dips in their brightness.
Occasionally, scientists can glimpse the atmosphere of an exoplanet (a feat that will become increasingly common with the powerful Webb telescope).
Researchers recently found that airborne minerals and gemstones are likely to be found on the cooler side of WASP-121 b, an exoplanet 855 light-years from Earth. There, it’s cold enough for the minerals in the atmosphere to condense. High atmospheric—such as magnesium, iron, vanadium, chromium, and nickel—is in the clouds.
“I don’t think we can say for sure what they will look like, because the formation of clouds is complex and we don’t have clouds like these,” Thomas Michal Evans, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute and lead author of the research that announced the discovery, told Mashable. Let’s watch it closely in our solar system.”
But he speculated that these extraterrestrial clouds could resemble dust storms on Earth. Some clouds may be colored blue or red, others gray or green. Sometimes, the clouds can condense into droplets, which eventually means that gems are falling from the sky.
Strange planet shaped like a rugby ball
Most planets are spherical, but not WASP-103b. The European Space Agency (ESA) Chups Space Telescope found WASP-103-b – a planet twice the size of Jupiter – orbiting its star in just one day. This causes intense drag on the planet, which is a much denser version of how the moon pulls the tides on the Earth, and eventually, this pulling distorted the shape of the planet from its once spherical shape.
The Khufu satellite measures subtle changes in light and was able to observe the strange shape of the planet as it passed in front of its star.
“The magnitude of the tidal distortion effect on the light curve across exoplanets is very small, but thanks to Khufu’s high resolution, we can see this for the first time,” said Katie Isaac, Khufu Project Scientist at the European Space Agency.
The discovery of “Super Neptune”
About 150 light-years from Earth, astronomers have discovered a “super-Neptune” (a planet slightly larger than Neptune) with water vapor in its atmosphere, and this is rare.
“At 150 light-years away, TOI-674 is astronomically close, which is one of the reasons scientists have been able to extract the chemical composition of its atmosphere,” NASA wrote.
“There are still many questions, such as how much water vapor its atmosphere holds, but observing a planet’s atmosphere (TOI-674 b) is much easier than observing the atmosphere of many exoplanets, making it a prime target for a deeper investigation,” the space agency added. .
Perhaps the James Webb Telescope will look deeper into the atmosphere of this exoplanet.
An exoplanet is still forming
Planetary scientists have discovered a giant exoplanet (AB Aurigae b) still in the process of formation.
The more than 30-year-old Hubble Space Telescope imaged the planet, which is developing in a still young and fickle disk of gas and dust, called the protoplanetary disk.
And the newborn star of the solar system is only 2 million years old (the Sun, for example, is more than 4.5 billion years old).
The new planet is giant, and scientists believe it is nine times larger than Jupiter, and it orbits deeply far from its star, about 8.6 billion miles away, which is more than twice the distance from Pluto from the sun.
Unlike most planets, which researchers believe formed when smaller objects collided in a planetary disk and grew into large, hot planetary objects, AB Aurigae b may have formed when its cooled disk shattered into large pieces.
