This Hostile Exoplanet Has Iron Clouds And Rains Gemstones
For the first time, astronomers have observed the night side of an exoplanet and its atmosphere in spectroscopic detail, coming out with some hellish scenarios such as clouds made out of iron and rains of gems on the smoldering gas giant floating far away in space. WASP-121b was first sighted in 2015 and proved an interesting finding from the get-go. With a revolution period of just about 30 hours around its parent star, it has one of the shortest planetary orbits astronomers have detected so far.
Another hot fact about WASP-121b is that it is tidally locked, which means one side of the planet permanently faces its star while the other side remains in perpetual darkness. Tidal Locking happens when the rotation period of a world around its axis matches the revolution period. As a result, the dayside goes to the extremes of blistering heat if the star is close. Take, for example, the tidally-locked WASP-76b exoplanet, which is hot enough to vaporize iron on the dayside and rain them down on the night side.
Related: This Planet Orbiting A Dying Sun Could Potentially Sustain Life
The latest exoplanet to show its hellish colors is WASP-121b, located about 850 light-years away from Earth. A team from MIT measured the temperature changes between the planet's day and night sides and observed the movement of water vapors for the first time. And per the research paper published in Nature Astronomy, things are a bit too intense on the night side. A searing temperature of around 3000 Kelvin rips apart the atoms that make water and then hurls them with winds at speeds exceeding 11,000 miles per hour. However, water-forming atoms are not the only thing moving with the winds.
Even on WASP-121 b's colder night side, MIT experts detected
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