STScI: No Blue Skies for Super-Hot Planet WASP-79b

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STScI: No Blue Skies for Super-Hot Planet WASP-79b

Post by bystander » Fri May 01, 2020 8:11 pm

No Blue Skies for Super-Hot Planet WASP-79b
STScI | HubbleSite | 2020 Apr 30
STScI-H-2018a-b-1280x720.jpg
Artist's Illustration of the Super-Hot Exoplanet WASP-79b
Credits: NASA, ESA, L. Hustak (STScI)

The weather forecast for the giant, super-hot Jupiter-size planet WASP-79b is steamy humidity, scattered clouds, iron rain, and yellow skies.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope teamed up with the Magellan Consortium's Magellan II Telescope in Chile to analyze the atmosphere of this planet, which orbits a star that is hotter and brighter than our Sun, and is located at a distance of 780 light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus. Among exoplanets, planets that encircle stars beyond our Sun, WASP-79b is among the largest ever observed.

The surprise in recently published results, is that the planet's sky doesn't have any evidence for an atmospheric phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering, where certain colors of light are dispersed by very fine dust particles in the upper atmosphere. Rayleigh scattering is what makes Earth's skies blue by scattering the shorter (bluer) wavelengths of sunlight.

Because WASP-79b doesn't seem to have this phenomenon, the daytime sky would likely be yellowish, researchers say. ...

Transmission Spectroscopy of WASP-79b from 0.6 to 5.0 μm ~ Kristin S. Sotzen et al
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