Ground-breaking observations reveal clouds, chemical reactions and more on a world outside our Solar System.
WASP-39b is a ‘hot Jupiter’ located 215 parsecs from Earth. The gas giant is about one-third the mass of Jupiter and more similar in composition to Saturn. It orbits its host star in just four Earth days and is eight times closer to it than Mercury is to our Sun, making it incredibly hot at nearly 900 degrees Celsius.
“Photochemistry, because it is such an important process here on Earth, is probably an important process on other potentially habitable planets,” says Jacob Bean, an astronomer at the University of Chicago in Illinois and the observation team’s co-leader. Until now, “we’ve only been able to test our understanding of photochemistry in our Solar System. But planets around other stars give us access to completely different physical conditions”.
The observations also show the planet — which is tidally locked to its star, so the same face always points towards it because of the immense gravitational attraction — has incomplete cloud cover, something astronomers have never observed before on an exoplanet. At the boundary of night and day, the planet is “only about 60% is covered by clouds”, says Bean, perhaps caused by clouds evaporating as they reach the hotter day side and condensing as they reach the cooler night.
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