As the Hubble Space Telescope celebrates 32 years in orbit as a good wine, it is getting better with age as it continues to study the universe and teach us more about our place in space. Hubble not only makes breathtaking images of our universe, but also studies our own solar system, galaxies and exoplanets. This is the last topic Hubble has been working on lately.
In two articles published in the Nature and Astrophysical Journal Letters, teams of Hubble astronomers reported strange weather conditions in two boiling worlds known as hot Jupiters, WASP-178b and KELT-20b. The Nature study describes evaporated rain on WASP-178b, while the Astrophysical Journal Letters study discusses how the upper atmosphere of KELT-20b gets hotter than cooler because it is “burned” by intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the star.
Impression of an artist from the ultra hot Jupiter KELT-20b. (Credit: NASA / ESA / Leah Hustak, Space Telescope Science Institute)
“We still don’t have a good understanding of time in different planetary environments,” said David Singh of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and co-author of the two studies. “When you look at the Earth, all our weather forecasts are still fine-tuned to what we can measure. But when you go to a distant exoplanet, you have limited predictive abilities because you have not developed a general theory of how everything in the atmosphere goes together and reacts to extreme conditions. Although you know basic chemistry and physics, you don’t know how it will manifest itself in complex ways. “
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WASP-178b is located about 1300 light years from Earth. During the day the atmosphere is cloudless and enriched with silica gas. As one side of the planet is constantly facing its star, the hot atmosphere is moving toward the night side at super hurricane speeds in excess of 2,000 miles per hour. On the dark side, silica can cool enough to condense into a rock that rains from clouds, but even at dawn and dusk, the planet is hot enough to evaporate the rock. “We knew we saw something really interesting with this feature of silicon monoxide,” said Josh Lothringer of the University of Utah Valley in Orem, Utah, and lead author of the Nature study.
Although super hot Jupiters are uninhabitable, this type of research is helping to pave the way for a better understanding of the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets. “If we can’t figure out what’s happening on super-hot Jupiters, where we have reliable solid observational data, we won’t have a chance to understand what’s happening in the weaker spectra of terrestrial exoplanet observations,” Lorringer said. “This is a test of our techniques that allows us to build a common understanding of physical properties such as cloud formation and the structure of the atmosphere.
Hot Jupiters
Exoplanets, known as hot Jupiters, are exactly what their name suggests, as they are planets physically similar to Jupiter, but instead orbit extremely close to their parent star, often taking only a few days to complete an orbit. . As with WASP-178b and KELT-20b, most hot Jupiters can withstand hot temperatures above 1650 ° C (3000 ° F). This is hot enough to evaporate most metals, including titanium, as hot Jupiters have the hottest planetary atmosphere ever seen. Another unique feature of hot Jupiters is that although they do not exist in our solar system, they are quite common in the galaxy, as it is currently estimated that about one in 10 stars has hot Jupiter. Ironically, the first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star was actually hot Jupiter, 51 Pegasi b. The first exoplanet discovered was in 1992, when two bodies the size of a planet orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257 + 12 were discovered.
Impression of an artist from a hot exoplanet of Jupiter. (Credit: C. Carreau / ESA)
Hubble Space Telescope
As mentioned, Hubble has been in orbit for 32 years and continues to teach us about our place in space. Launched in 1990 aboard the Discovery space shuttle, Hubble is named after American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who discovered the expansion of the universe in the 1920s. Now the famous telescope, named after the famous astronomer, has made more than a million observations since the beginning of its mission. Hubble recently depicted the most distant single star ever discovered in space, a staggering 12.9 billion light-years from Earth.
Hubble, as seen from the Discovery space shuttle during his second service mission. (Credit: NASA)
With the recent launch of the James Webb Space Telescope and the lack of planned Hubble service missions, the days of the aging telescope in space will not last forever. Although there are estimates that Hubble can last until the end of the decade, Hubble is slowly experiencing software failures, another sign that it is in last place. While it is still functioning, what future discoveries can it unlock for our universe? Only time will tell and that’s why we science!
As always, keep doing science and keep looking up!
Sources: NASA (1), ESA Hubble, NASA (2), Space.com, NASA (3), Nature (1), Astrophysical Journal Letters, EarthSky, Nature (2), Nature (3), BBC, Smithsonian Magazine, Goddard Space Flight Center, MIT Technology Review
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