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Discovered clouds on a distant exoplanet

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An international team of astronomers not only discovered clouds on the distant exoplanet WASP-127b, but also measured their height with amazing accuracy.

Romain Allart’s presentation at the European Science Congress (EPSC) 2021 shows how, by combining data from space and ground-based telescopes, the team was able to reveal the upper structure of the planet’s atmosphere. This opens the way for similar exploration of many other distant worlds.

WASP-127b is located more than 525 light-years from us and represents “hot Saturn” – a giant planet, similar in mass to Saturn, which orbits very close to its sun. The team watched the planet pass in front of the star to discover patterns that are embedded in the starlight as it filters through the planet’s atmosphere and is altered by chemical constituents. By combining infrared observations from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and visible light measurements with the ESPRESSO spectrograph at the ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the researchers were able to explore different regions of the atmosphere. The results brought several surprises.

“Firstly, as previously discovered on planets of this type, we detected the presence of sodium, but at a much lower altitude than expected. Secondly, there were strong signals of water vapor in the infrared, but not at all in the visible. This means that water vapor at lower levels is shielded by clouds that are opaque in the visible wavelength range but transparent in the infrared, ”said Allart, who led the study.

The combined data from the two instruments allowed the researchers to narrow the height of the clouds to the atmospheric layer with pressures ranging from 0.3 to 0.5 millibars.

“We do not yet know the composition of the clouds, except that they are not water droplets like on Earth,” Allart said. “We’re also baffled as to why sodium is found on this planet. Further research will help to learn more not only about the structure of the atmosphere, but also about WASP-127b, which turned out to be a very interesting place. ”

A complete revolution around the star takes about 4 days, WASP-127b receives 600 times more radiation than Earth, and experiences temperatures up to 1100 degrees Celsius. This swells the planet to a radius 1.3 times that of Jupiter at 1/5 its mass, making it one of the least dense or “fluffiest” exoplanets found.

The expanded nature of fluffy exoplanets makes them easier to observe, and therefore WASP-127b is an ideal candidate for researchers working on atmospheric characteristics.

The observations of the group with the ESPRESSO instrument also show that, unlike planets in the solar system, WASP-127b rotates not only in the direction opposite to the star, but also in a plane other than the equatorial one.

“This alignment is unexpected for hot Saturn in the old star system and could be caused by an unknown moon,” Allart said. “All of these unique characteristics make WASP-127b a planet that will be very closely studied in the future.”

The Echelle Exoplanet Rocky and Stable Spectroscopic Observation Spectrograph (ESPRESSO) is the world’s most accurate radial velocity spectrograph.

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Space

Elon Musk Claims SpaceX Starship Will Take Humanity To Mars

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Even though his rocket exploded under atmospheric pressure
after its launch, Elon Musk has proudly proclaimed that his Starship
will be taking humanity to Mars.

The huge rocket hit a major milestone during its flight test on Thursday.

Though the test flight was launched successfully into space, it ended in
tragedy when the rocket lost contact with SpaceX while re-entering the
atmosphere.

This has lead some to questioning whether Musk’s Starship is even capable of reaching the Red Planet without exploding.

The Mail Online reports:
The mishap marks the third $3 billion Starship to be lost during tests
flights in less than one year – and the Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) has opened investigation to determine what went wrong.

The two-stage craft, consisting of the Starship cruise vessel mounted
atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster, took off from SpaceX‘s Boca Chica, Texas, flight test facility on the Gulf Coast at 9:25am ET.

But SpaceX revealed around 10:35am ET that the world’s most powerful rocket had been lost.

‘The team has made the call that the ship has been lost, so no
splashdown today,’ said Dan Huot, SpaceX communications manager, during
the live broadcast.

‘But again, just it’s incredible to see how much further we got this time around.’

SpaceX’s mission plan did not include recovering the rocket from the
Indian Ocean after splashdown, but Starship breaking up in the
atmosphere was unexpected.

n 2020, Musk revealed his plan for Starship to send humans to Mars.

He calculated that to put one million humans on the Red Planet by
2025, his rockets would need to conducted around three flights a day and
a total of 1,000 flights a year – but 2025 is just around the corner.

The billionaire previously renewed his vow to colonize the Martian world in a post on X last month.

‘I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind multiplanetary civilization,’ the post read.

Musk’s reposted the message from his personal account with the accompanying words: ‘Only if civilization lasts long enough.’

One day before the mission, former President Barack Obama was
speaking at a renewable energy conference in Paris and mentioned
‘tycoons, many of whom are building spaceships’ that could take humans
to Mars.’

‘But when I hear some of the people talk about the plan to
colonize Mars because the Earth environment may become so degraded that
it becomes unlivable, I look at them like, what are you talking about,’
he continued.

‘I would rather us invest in taking care of this planet here.’

While Thursday’s mission did not end as planned, the test flight was the farthest performed with a Starship rocket.

The most powerful and largest launch vehicle ever constructed,
Starship achieved one key first goal: successful separation from its
Super Heavy booster.

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There’s one last place Planet Nine could be hiding

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A study recently submitted to The Astronomical Journal
continues to search for the elusive Planet Nine (also called Planet X),
which is a hypothetical planet that potentially orbits in the outer
reaches of the solar system and well beyond the orbit of the dwarf
planet, Pluto.

The goal of this study, which is available on the pre-print server arXiv,
was to narrow down the possible locations of Planet Nine and holds the
potential to help researchers better understand the makeup of our solar
system, along with its formation and evolutionary processes. So, what
was the motivation behind this study regarding narrowing down the
location of a potential Planet 9?

Dr. Mike Brown, who is a Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of
Astronomy at Caltech and lead author of the study, tells Universe Today,
“We are continuing to try to systematically cover all of the regions of
the sky where we predict Planet Nine to be. Using data from Pan-STARRS
allowed us to cover the largest region to date.”

Pan-STARRS, which stands for Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid
Response System, is a collaborative astronomical observation system
located at Haleakala Observatory and operated by the University of
Hawai’i Institute of Astronomy. For the study, the researchers used data
from Data Release 2 (DR2) with the goal of narrowing down the possible
location of Planet Nine based on findings from past studies.

In the end, the team narrowed down possible locations of Planet Nine
by eliminating approximately 78% of possible locations that were
calculated from previous studies. Additionally, the researchers also
provided new estimates for the approximate semimajor axis (measured in
astronomical units, AU) and Earth-mass size of Planet Nine at 500 and
6.6, respectively. So, what are the most significant results from this
study, and what follow-up studies are currently being conducted or
planned?

“While I would love to say that the most significant result
was finding Planet Nine, we didn’t,” Dr. Brown tells Universe Today. “So
instead, it means that we have significantly narrowed the search area.
We’ve now surveyed approximately 80% of the regions where we think
Planet Nine might be.”

In terms of follow-up studies, Dr.
Brown tells Universe Today, “I think that the LSST is the most likely
survey to find Planet Nine. When it comes online in a year or two it
will quickly cover much of the search space and, if Planet Nine is
there, find it.”

LSST stands for Legacy Survey of Space and Time, and is an
astronomical survey currently scheduled as a 10-year program to study
the southern sky and take place at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in
Chile, which is presently under construction.

Objectives for LSST include studying identifying near-Earth asteroids
(NEAs) and small planetary bodies within our solar system, but also
include deep space studies, as well. These include investigating the
properties of dark matter and dark energy and the evolution of the Milky
Way galaxy. But what is the importance of finding Planet Nine?

Dr. Brown tells Universe Today, “This would be the 5th
largest planet of our solar system and the only one with a mass between
Earth and Uranus. Such planets are common around other stars, and we
would suddenly have a chance to study one in our own solar system.”

Scientists began hypothesizing the existence of Planet Nine shortly
after the discovery of Neptune in 1846, including an 1880 memoir
authored by D. Kirkwood and later a 1946 paper authored by American
astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, who was responsible for discovering Pluto in
1930.

More recent studies include studies from 2016 and 2017 presenting
evidence for the existence of Planet Nine, the former of which was
co-authored by Dr. Brown.

This most recent study marks the
most complete investigation of narrowing down the location of Planet
Nine, which Dr. Brown has long-believed exists, telling Universe Today,
“There are too many separate signs that Planet Nine is there. The solar
system is very difficult to understand without Planet Nine.”

He continues by telling Universe Today that “…Planet Nine explains
many things about orbits of objects in the outer solar system that would
be otherwise unexplainable and would each need some sort of separate
explanation.”

“The cluster of the directions of the orbits is the best know, but
there is also the large perihelion distances of many objects, existence
of highly inclined and even retrograde objects, and the high abundance
of very eccentric orbits which cross inside the orbit of Neptune. None
of these should happen in the solar system, but all are easily
explainable as an effect of Planet Nine.”

More information:
Michael E. Brown et al, A Pan-STARRS1 Search for Planet Nine, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.17977

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