Jewel clouds ? Newly Discovered Exoplanet Containing Cloud of Jewels
For the first time in the history of science, Scientists have discovered a massive gas planet outside the solar system, changing weathers patterns. Scientists have named this planet HAT-P-7B. This planet was first discovered in 2008 by a group of Japanese Scientists from National Astronomical Observatory of Japan led by Norio Narita.
Later, a team of researchers from the University of Warwick has found that theExoplanet HAT-P-7b is affected by a large scale of catastrophic storms. Using the data collected by NASA's Kepler Space telescope between 2009 to 2013, Scientists now able to find the reason behind the weather change .
HAT-P-7B is about 1040 light years( 320 parsecs) away from Earth. It sizes 40 percent bigger than the largest planet in the Solar system, Jupiter & 16 times bigger than the planet Earth. It appears in the constellation of Cygnus.
Lead author of The University of Warwick, Dr. David Armstrong said in a statement,"Using the NASA Kepler satellite we were able to study light reflected from HAT-P-7b's atmosphere, finding that the atmosphere was changing over time".
HAT-P-7b Orbits it's parent star in just 2.2 days. Due to the extreme proximity, this planet is tidally locked with its parent star. In the same way, The Moon faces only one side towards Earth, that means it doesn't have any axial rotation.
As it always faces one side towards its parent star,it has a super extreme temperature at the day side. The average temperature of day side is almost 2,860 Kelvin(4,690° F) makes it inhabitable for life. These results were first published on 12th December 2016, in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Dr. Armstrong and his team noticed that the brightest spot of this planet changes over the time. That evidence & the changing speeds of wind denote the certain changes of weather & the formations of clouds. Although those clouds are not like Earth's clouds, dust modeling work of HAT-P-7b suggests that those clouds are made of Corundum. Corundum is a kind of mineral which is used to form Ruby & Sapphire.
Although scientists are not fully confirmed about these gem based cloud because they are billions of miles away. So, currently it is impossible to analyze those samples, but it's still an amazing discovery to notice those patterns in a gas giant exoplanet.
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