(ORDO NEWS) — The alien world, located just 70 light years from Earth, is one of the strangest we have ever found.
It has a mass of 20 Jovian masses, has a temperature that can quickly melt aluminum, and has 10,000 years around not one but two stars. And, oh yes, it is being devastated by a relentless, raging sandstorm.
Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to get the most accurate observations of a planetary mass object by detecting swirling clouds. silicate grains circulating in the atmosphere of a world called VHS 1256 b.
In addition, the team identified many atmospheric components of VHS 1256 b. These include unambiguous detections of methane, carbon monoxide and water, with additional evidence of carbon dioxide.
“No other telescope has identified so many features at once for a single target,” says astrophysicist Paul Molière of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
“We see many molecules in the same spectrum as the JWST, which detail the planet’s dynamic cloud and weather systems.”
VHS 1256 b is somewhat of a mystery. Its mass is on the borderline between giant planets and brown dwarfs, “failed stars” that are not massive enough to fuse hydrogen but can fuse the heavier hydrogen isotope deuterium in their cores, which has a lower fusion temperature and pressure than hydrogen.
It is believed that the two types of objects are formed in completely different ways.
Brown dwarfs typically form like stars, collapsing from a dense clump of material into a cloud of gas and dust, then sucking in more material to grow.
The deuterium fusion is an intermediate step as a star grows, but some stars – brown dwarfs – stop growing at this point and remain as they are.
On the other hand, planets are thought to form from the bottom up, from the material left over from the formation of a star, sticking together to grow into a planet.
This material is generally thought to be fairly close to the star. The large orbital distance of VHS 1256 b from its two suns suggests that it formed as a result of cloud collapse, but this is not diagnostic.
Theoretically, planets can also form according to the cloud collapse model; the estimated minimum mass of a cloud collapse object is one Jupiter.
So the dividing line between the planet and the brown dwarf is the deuterium-burning mass limit, meaning that the exact nature of VHS 1256 b is unknown.
But it was this great distance that made it possible to make such spectacular observations.
“VHS 1256 b is about four times farther from its stars than Pluto is from our Sun, making it a great target for Webb,” says astronomer Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona, who led the international research team.
“This means that the light of the planet does not mix with the light of its stars.”
The JWST observation range is infrared and near infrared, including thermal radiation. And VHS 1256 b is very young, only 150 million years old, and still quite hot due to the formation process.
Its atmosphere, in which sand clouds can be found, reaches 830 degrees Celsius (1526 degrees Fahrenheit).
This warmth, along with its low gravity, is what makes its sky so turbulent.
The scientists analyzed the light detected by JWST, examining the spectrum in great detail to highlight the features created by different elements that absorb specific wavelengths.
In this way, they identified various gases found in the object’s atmosphere and clouds of sand, which are constantly changing and are likely composed of enstatite, forsterite, or quartz.
The data was so detailed that the researchers were also able to identify different grain sizes from smaller grains like smoke particles to larger grains like sand.
The researchers hypothesized that these larger particles are too heavy to remain in the upper atmosphere and sink back into the atmosphere as the smaller particles rise.
This results in a dramatic change in the world’s brightness over the hours of the day, suggesting that silicate clouds may be a common mechanism for creating such variations in brown dwarfs.
The team believes the observations can be easily replicated for other brown dwarfs, which could help us learn more about these strange objects.
And VHS 1256 b gave us a lot of food for thought.
“We have isolated silicates, but to better understand what grain sizes and shapes correspond to specific cloud types, a lot of additional work will be required,” says astrophysicist Elizabeth Matthews of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. modeling effort to understand complex JWST data.”
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