Iron rain on exoplanet is driven by huge extremes in temperature
Friday, March 27, 2020 IST
It could be raining molten iron on some exoplanets, according to David Ehrenreich at the University of Geneva and an international team of astronomers. The team discovered evidence for the metallic precipitation in atmospheric spectra of the giant, ultra-hot planet WASP-76b that is about 390 light-years from Earth. Their findings could provide new insights into the exotic chemistry that plays out in the atmospheres of such hot gas giants.
“Hot Jupiters” such as WASP-76b comprise a widely studied group of giant exoplanets that orbit close to their host stars, where they can experience daytime temperatures exceeding 2000 K. Such conditions are extreme enough to break down molecules in the planets’ atmospheres into individual atoms, which recombine back into molecules during the cooler nights. Clearly, this effect would produce extreme differences in atmospheric chemistry between both sides of these planets, but so far, astronomers have not confirmed this asymmetry through direct observations.
In the new study, Ehrenreich’s team has measured such a chemical gradient for the first time, using the ESPRESSO spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. With the instrument, the researchers could collect light from any combination of the VLT’s four 8-metre telescopes. This provided them with sufficiently high spectral resolution to check for differences in the absorption spectra produced by the atmosphere on the day and night sides of WASP-76b as it passed in front of its host star. In particular, they looked for a gap in the star’s spectrum corresponding to the characteristic wavelengths absorbed by atomized, or “neutral” iron.
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