Hubble probes extreme weather on ultra-hot Jupiters
In studying a unique class of ultra-hot exoplanets, NASA Hubble Space Telescope astronomers may be in the mood for dancing to the Calypso party song"Hot, Hot, Hot." That's because these bloated Jupiter-sized worlds are so precariously close to their parent star they are being roasted at seething temperatures above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's hot enough to vaporize most metals, including titanium. They have the hottest planetary atmospheres ever seen.
"We still don't have a good understanding of weather in different planetary environments," said David Sing of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, co-author on two studies being reported."When you look at Earth, all our weather predictions are still finely tuned to what we can measure.
Evidence came from Hubble's detection of water in near-infrared observations, and from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope's detection of carbon monoxide. They radiate through the hot, transparent upper atmosphere that is produced by the inversion layer. This signature is unique from what astronomers see in the atmospheres of hot-Jupiters orbiting cooler stars, like our Sun."The emission spectrum for KELT-20b is quite different from other hot-Jupiters," said Fu.