Hubble Probes Bizarre Weather Conditions on Sizzling Worlds
This is an artist’s illustration of the planet KELT-20b which orbits a blue-white star. The giant planet is so close to its star (5 million miles) the torrent of ultraviolet radiation from the star heats the planet’s atmosphere to over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This creates a thermal layer where the atmosphere increases in temperature with altitude. This is the best evidence to date – gleaned from the Hubble Space Telescope – for a host star affecting a planet’s atmosphere directly. The seething planet is 456 light-years away. Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)
Sizzling Worlds Vaporize Most of the Dust in Their Atmospheres
“When you’re hot, you’re hot!” crooned country singer Jerry Reed in a top 1971 pop music song. Hubble astronomers might change the lyrics to: “when you’re hot, you’re super-hot!”
This comes from studying planets that are so precariously close to their parent star they are being roasted at seething temperatures above 3,000 degrees DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04453-2
“Strong H2O and CO Emission Features in the Spectrum of KELT-20b Driven by Stellar UV Irradiation” by Guangwei Fu, David K. Sing, Joshua D. Lothringer, Drake Deming, Jegug Ih, Eliza M. -R. Kempton, Matej Malik, Thaddeus D. Komacek, Megan Mansfield and Jacob L. Bean, 24 January 2022, Astrophysical Journal Letters.
DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac4968
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of…
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