A mysterious alien world covered in clouds of silicate grains that resemble sand has been discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRSpec and MIRI sensors found the exoplanet, which was described in a new paper as the first detection of its sort. Scientists discovered indications of silicate-rich clouds surrounding a brown dwarf that was almost 20 times the size of Jupiter in the data. The discovery supports certain past hypotheses on these strange planet-like planets.
The existence of turbulent, rapidly shifting atmospheres around some types of brown dwarfs has long been theorized by astronomers. (Photo courtesy of N.A.S.A/JPL-Caltech)
Brown dwarfs are weird things that are just a little bit too massive to be planets but not quite big enough to burst into stars. While brown dwarfs cannot burn normal hydrogen, they can burn deuterium to generate their own light and heat (a less common isotope of hydrogen that contains an extra neutron).
A brown dwarf known as VHS 1256 b is located 72 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Corvus, sometimes known as the Crow. It orbits two little red dwarf stars. The strange exoplanet was discovered by astronomers in 2016, and ever since then, its reddish glow has baffled them. They surmised that some sort of atmosphere was responsible for the brightness. Forbes claims that observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have now confirmed those hypotheses, proving that VHS 1256 b must be encircled by dense clouds containing silicate grains that resemble sand.
Webb also discovered the presence of water, methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium, and potassium in the atmosphere of VHS 1256 b.
As the project’s main researcher and an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine, Brittany Miles said in an email to Space.com, “We will know more from iterations on the data reduction.” It appears to be fairly consistent with theoretical predictions thus far.
Because of how extensive the Webb data were, it was discovered that the ratio of the different gases varied throughout the atmosphere of VHS 1256 b, suggesting that the atmosphere is not static but rather chaotic and turbulent.
According to co-author of the paper Sasha Hinkley, an astronomer at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, “in a tranquil atmosphere, there is an expected ratio of, say, methane and carbon monoxide.” However, we are seeing that this ratio is highly skewed in the atmospheres of many exoplanets. This suggests that there is turbulent vertical mixing taking place in these atmospheres, bringing up carbon dioxide from deep within to mix with methane at a higher altitude.
VHS 1256 b is small for a brown dwarf, suggesting that the body is young. The exoplanet orbits its two parent stars 360 sun-Earth distances apart in an oval-shaped orbit that takes 17,000 years to complete.
Soucre: news.sci-nature.com
