Scientists began to unravel mysteriesJupiter’s planets Hot”, including how the exoplanets burn during the day and cool the night.
Hot Jupiters are gas giants that orbit near their star, usually in less than 10 days. Because of this proximity, the radiation from the star heats the planet by several hundred to a few thousand degrees.
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According to the British newspaper Daily Mail, in one of the largest surveys of the atmospheres of exoplanets ever conducted, UCLA researchers discovered that the day and night sides of hot Jupiter are completely different.
During the day, it burns at temperatures between 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit and 4,940 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to vaporize most metals, including titanium — but at night the temperatures drop by hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit.
On average, the researchers found a difference of 1,000 K in temperatures between day and night.
Although there are no “hot Jupiters” in our solar system, they are a common type of exoplanet. Of the approximately 5,000 known exoplanets, more than 300 are hot Jupiters.
In one of the largest surveys of exoplanet atmospheres ever, University of California researchers were able to answer five long-standing questions about these hot planets.
Using a large sample of exoplanets and analyzing a very large amount of data, the researchers said they were able to identify trends and solve questions that smaller studies have not been able to answer definitively over many years.
In addition to extreme changes in temperature, they also found that many hot Jupiters have thermally inverted atmospheres, also known as stratospheres – meaning the upper atmosphere has temperatures that increase with altitude.
This appears to be due to the presence of metallic elements – titanium oxide, vanadium oxide and iron hydride – which the researchers said absorb the star’s light and thus heat the atmosphere. This is a similar phenomenon that occurs on Earth through the ozone layer.
The researchers also found that some planets had less water than expected, indicating that they formed in a different way from the more water-rich planets, while they discovered more minerals than the models expected, which means that these planets likely formed differently than previously thought. .
A better understanding of exoplanets will help solve questions about the evolution of our solar system, the researchers said.
Lead author Dr. Quentin Changet said: “Many issues such as the origin of water on Earth, the composition of the Moon, and the different evolutionary history of Earth and Mars, remain unresolved despite our ability to obtain on-site measurements. Large studies of exoplanets, such as those that We present them here, to an understanding of those general processes.”
The researchers analyzed the atmospheres of 25 hot cosmic planets using data from nearly 1,000 hours of telescope observations.
This included 600 hours of observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and 400 hours from the Spitzer Space Telescope.
They combined two techniques – studying information from transits (where the planet passes in front of its star) and eclipses (when the planet passes behind its star).