NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope detected a changing atmosphere on exoplanet WASP-121 b, a hot Jupiter that orbits a star located about 880 light-years from Earth. The exoplanet completes a full orbit in a mere 30-hour period at anb extremely close proximity to its host star, which means that it’s tidally locked.
Since WASP-121 b is tidally locked, the exoplanet’s star-facing hemisphere is very hot, with temperatures exceeding 3000 Kelvins. The complete assembled dataset represents significant amount of observing time for a single planet and is currently the only consistent set of such repeated observations. Data extracted from those observations was used to characterize (chemistry, temperature, clouds, etc.) the atmosphere of WASP-121 b at different times, providing astronomers with a detailed picture of the planet, changing in time.
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The high resolution of our exoplanet atmosphere simulations allows us to accurately model the weather on ultra-hot planets like WASP-121 b. Here we make a significant step forward by combining observational constraints with atmosphere simulations to understand the time-varying weather on these planets,” said Jack Skinner, Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology.
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