A bizarre exoplanet that rains molten iron was discovered by astronomers. The exoplanet's weather conditions include a steady showering of molten iron rain, 2,400 degrees Celsius temperature, and winds above 10,000mph. They call this exoplanet the Wasp-76 b.
Exoplanets: Worlds Beyond Our Solar System
An exoplanet is a planet that existed outside of our solar system. There are thousands of exoplanets that are recorded and were mostly discovered by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. These planets come in various sizes and orbits: some are gigantic planets hugging close to their suns and some are icy, and some are rocky.
Astronomers have been relying on the radial velocity technique to measure how much a star "wobbles" when a planet or planets orbit it that is why most of the discovered exoplanets were Jupiter-size or even larger gas giants.
Currently, there are about 4,135 confirmed exoplanets, 5,047 candidates and 3,067 planetary systems recorded in the NASA archive. Some examples of an exoplanet are the PSR 1257+12 that was discovered in 1992; 51 Pegasi b which is a Jupiter-mass planet 20 times closer to its sun than Earth is to it's sun; and just recently, astronomers have discovered a new exoplanet about 640 light-years away from Earth.
Wasp-76 b: Where Iron Rains From the Sky
University of Geneva astronomer David Ehrenreich, who led the study said in a press release that the newly discovered bizarre exoplanet gets rainy in the evening, but instead of water, it rains iron.
Astronomers call this exoplanet Wasp-76 b which is slightly smaller than Jupiter and is somewhere in the constellation Pisces that is about 640 light-years away from our planet. This exoplanet is one of those gas giant worlds classified as hot Jupiters that orbit uncomfortably close to their sun- or nearly 10 times closer than Mercury to our sun, that causes its that is hot enough to vaporize metal.
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Because of its proximity to its home star, it leaves Wasp-76 b to be "tidally locked" to it. The star's gravity stretches the planet into a prolate spheroid shape that resembles a football.
The daytime hemisphere of Wasp-76 b causes the iron in its atmosphere because it gets a great amount radiation from its star. The wind then carries it to the planet's night side which has an extremely cooler temperature and there it lets iron condense into drops and fall as a bizarre rain.
University of Geneva researcher Christophe Lovis said in a media release that since they could not find iron vapor on the other side of the planet, they concluded that it has condensed on the night side of this extreme exoplanet.
This is the first time that astronomers were able to discover a day-to-night type of chemical variance on a hot Jupiter planet.
The observations were made possible because of a new instrument called the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, or ESPRESSO, which was originally designed to hunt those Earth-like planets that are around those Sun-like stars.
Ehrenreich said that "What we have now is a whole new way to trace the climate of the most extreme exoplanets."
The findings were published in the journal Nature, give us a new understanding into the huge diversity of planets beyond our solar system. Scientists are scheduled to launch next year a new observatory the Extremely Large Telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope that could bring us closer to the answer whether any of these planets outside our solar system are capable of supporting extraterrestrial life.
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