Researchers said on Monday they had spotted a very distant planet in our solar system, an extremely hot world slightly larger than Neptune that orbits a sun-like star every 19 hours and appears to be shrouded in metallic clouds. made of titanium and silicates that reflect most incoming light back into space.
“It’s a giant mirror in space,” said astronomer James Jenkins of the Diego Portales University and the Center of Excellence in Astrophysics and Associated Technologies (CATA) in Chile, co-author of the research published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The star reflects about 80% of incoming light, making it the most reflective object in the known universe. Venus, the brightest object in Earth’s night sky other than the Moon, is the most reflective object in our solar system, shrouded in toxic clouds of sulfuric acid. Venus reflects about 75% of incoming light. Earth reflects about 30%.
The planet, named LTT9779b, and its star are located in our galaxy, the Milky Way, about 264 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of the Sculptor. A light year is the distance that light travels in one year, equivalent to 9.5 trillion kilometers.
The planet’s diameter is about 4.7 times that of Earth and it orbits very close to its star — closer than the distance of our solar system’s innermost planet, Mercury, to the Sun and 60 times closer than the Earth’s orbit.
With its star’s intense solar radiation, its surface temperature is around 1,800°C, hotter than molten lava.
With its star so close, it’s surprising that the planet has any atmosphere at all, according to the researchers. An atmosphere with water-based clouds, like on Earth, would have been expelled by solar radiation a long time ago.
But they believe their clouds are metallic, a combination of titanium and silicate — the material that makes up most of the rocks in the Earth’s crust. “We even believe that clouds can condense into droplets and that titanium rain occurs in parts of the atmosphere,” said Jenkins.
“No other planet like this has been discovered so far,” said astronomer and lead author of the study, Sergio Hoyer, of the Laboratory of Astrophysics in Marseille, France.
Having an atmosphere while orbiting so close to its star makes it “a planet that shouldn’t exist,” according to Vivien Parmentier of the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France, who also took part in the study.
More than 5,000 planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, have been discovered, many with very different characteristics than the eight planets in our solar system.
With increasingly advanced instruments coming online — the James Webb Space Telescope became operational last year and the Extremely Large Telescope is under construction in Chile — more discoveries are to come.
“The diversity of exoplanets is staggering,” Parmentier said, “and we’ve only just scratched the surface.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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