Iron rain could be falling on this hot exoplanet
CNNCNN — The discovery of planets outside of our solar system, called exoplanets, has revealed strange worlds never imagined in our corner of the universe. “One could say that this planet gets rainy in the evening, except it rains iron,” said David Ehrenreich, study author and professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “It is raining iron on the night side of this extreme exoplanet.” This makes it the first detection of chemical variations on an ultra-hot gas giant exoplanet, according to the researchers. “The observations show that iron vapor is abundant in the atmosphere of the hot day side of WASP-76b,” said María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, an astrophysicist at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain, and chair of the ESPRESSO science team. There, the iron encounters much cooler environments, condenses and rains down.” The detection was possible thanks to the ESPRESSO instrument, which stands for Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations.
History of this topic
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