An exoplanet some 1,360 light-years away is so close to its star, its clouds consist of vaporized rock.
"We still don't have a good understanding of weather in different planetary environments,""When you look at Earth, all our weather predictions are still finely tuned to what we can measure. But when you go to a distant exoplanet, you have limited predictive powers because you haven't built a general theory about how everything in an atmosphere goes together and responds to extreme conditions.
Hot Jupiters in particular are absolutely fascinating and ripe for study. As the name suggests, these worlds are gas giants, like Jupiter, but they're also very hot, because they're on extremely close orbits with their stars – some whipping around inThey pose something of an interesting conundrum: they can't have formed at their current orbit, because gravity, radiation, and intense stellar winds ought to have kept the gas from clumping together.
Here's how. The exoplanet passes between us and its host star. With each transit, some of the light from the star is absorbed by atoms in the exoplanet's atmosphere; each element absorbs or emits on a different wavelength, meaning it can be identified as a signal in the spectrum of light received from the star.
The signal is absolutely minute, as you can imagine, but by stacking transits, astronomers can amplify the spectrum to get a readable signal. Using this method, vaporized metals such as titanium, iron, and magnesiumA team of researchers led by Sing and his colleague Josh Lothringer of Utah Valley University used the Hubble Space Telescope to obtain the spectrum of WASP-178b, and found a signal unlike anything ever seen before.
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