ramonmercado
CyberPunk
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2003
- Messages
- 58,109
- Location
- Eblana
Probably not a good choice for colonising.
An alien world just 70 light-years from Earth is one of the strangest we have found yet.
It clocks in at 20 Jupiter masses, has temperatures that could quickly melt aluminum, and has a 10,000-year orbit around not one but two stars. And, oh yeah: It's ravaged by a constant, tempestuous storm of sand.
Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to obtain the most high-fidelity observations yet of the planetary-mass object, revealing roiling clouds of silicate grains circulating in the atmosphere of the world named VHS 1256 b.
The discovery, published last year on the preprint server arXiv, has gone through the peer review process and is due to appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
In addition, the team identified many of the components of VHS 1256 b's atmosphere. Those 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 Mollière of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. "We're seeing many molecules in a single spectrum from the JWST that detail the planet's dynamic cloud and weather systems."
https://www.sciencealert.com/astron...en-world-with-two-suns-and-a-raging-sandstorm
An alien world just 70 light-years from Earth is one of the strangest we have found yet.
It clocks in at 20 Jupiter masses, has temperatures that could quickly melt aluminum, and has a 10,000-year orbit around not one but two stars. And, oh yeah: It's ravaged by a constant, tempestuous storm of sand.
Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to obtain the most high-fidelity observations yet of the planetary-mass object, revealing roiling clouds of silicate grains circulating in the atmosphere of the world named VHS 1256 b.
The discovery, published last year on the preprint server arXiv, has gone through the peer review process and is due to appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
In addition, the team identified many of the components of VHS 1256 b's atmosphere. Those 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 Mollière of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. "We're seeing many molecules in a single spectrum from the JWST that detail the planet's dynamic cloud and weather systems."
https://www.sciencealert.com/astron...en-world-with-two-suns-and-a-raging-sandstorm