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Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have detected massive cyclones and other dynamic weather activity swirling on WASP-121b, an ultra-hot Jupiter exoplanet about 881 light-years away in the Puppis constellation.
This artist’s illustration shows WASP-121b, an alien world that is losing magnesium and iron gas from its atmosphere. Image credit: NASA/ESA/J. Olmsted, STScI.
wasp-121b It is a gas giant exoplanet 1.87 times larger than Jupiter and 1.18 times more massive.
First discovered in 2016, this alien world takes just 1.3 days to orbit its F6-type parent star, WASP-121.
WASP-121b is so close to the star that if it got any closer, the star’s gravity would begin to tear it apart.
Astronomers estimate the planet’s temperature to be about 2,500 degrees Celsius (4,600 degrees Fahrenheit), hot enough to boil some metals.
In the new research, Caltech astronomer Jack Skinner and his colleagues analyzed observations of WASP-12 b taken by Hubble in 2016, 2018 and 2019.
Researchers discovered that the planet has a dynamic atmosphere that changes over time.
They used sophisticated modeling techniques to show that these dramatic temporal variations could be explained by weather patterns in the exoplanet’s atmosphere.
They found that WASP-121b’s atmosphere shows notable differences between observations.
Most dramatically, there could be massive weather fronts, massive storms and cyclones that are repeatedly created and destroyed due to the large temperature difference between the star-facing side and the dark side of the exoplanet.
The authors also detected an apparent shift between the hottest region of the exoplanet and the point of the planet closest to the star, as well as variability in the chemical composition of the exoplanet’s atmosphere (measured by spectroscopy).
They reached these conclusions using computational models to help explain the observed changes in the exoplanet’s atmosphere.
“The remarkable details of our exoplanet atmosphere simulations allow us to accurately model the climate on ultrahot planets like WASP-121b,” said Dr. Skinner.
“Here we take an important step forward by combining observational constraints with simulations of the atmosphere to understand the temporal variation of weather on these planets.”
“This is a hugely exciting result as we make progress in observing weather patterns on exoplanets,” said Dr. Quentin Changeat, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
“Studying the climate of exoplanets is vital to understanding the complexity of exoplanet atmospheres on other worlds, especially in the search for exoplanets with habitable conditions.”
“The assembled data set represents a significant amount of observation time for a single planet and is currently the only consistent set of repeated observations.”
“The information we extracted from those observations was used to infer the chemistry, temperature and clouds of WASP-121b’s atmosphere at different times.”
“This gave us an exquisite picture of the planet changing over time.”
The teams paper will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.
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Quentin Changeat et al. 2024. Is the atmosphere of ultrahot Jupiter WASP-121b variable? apjs, in press; arXiv:2401.01465
