Alien planets are shrouded in hazes that hide clues to their makeup. Lab experiments could help clear the view. LongReads
“Most of the time, people treat these particles as nuisances,” says Lia Corrales, an astronomer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In a paper posted this month to the preprint server arXiv, Corrales and colleagues show how even slight changes to experimental conditions can. “Aerosols themselves have some of that [compositional] information because they have spectral shapes,” she says.
And so, Lewis grew it herself. As disappointingly flat exoplanet spectra trickled in, Lewis turned to Hörst, a close friend from graduate school who had just started to build her own tholin chamber for studies of Titan. Over the course of a year, Lewis worked to sell Hörst on modifying her setup to use the different gas mixtures and higher temperatures expected for looming exoplanet targets. Finally, in 2016, the team received funding from a new NASA exoplanet research program.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University create hazes by irradiating gases in a steel chamber. The color of the haze particles offers clues to their composition.When He flips a valve, the gas mixture races down pipes, twirls around a heating coil, and flows through a stainless steel chamber the size of a water bottle. There, the gas is held at light pressures meant to simulate the thin air at the top of an atmosphere.
At the time, billions of years ago, Earth’s atmosphere was thought to be mostly nitrogen with some carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor. That recipe would give rise to organic hazes similar to Titan’s and water clouds like those on Earth today. Arney ran climate models to simulate the effects of these aerosols on Earth-like planets.
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Astronomers find 2nd Earth-size planet in intriguing alien solar systemMeghan is a senior writer at Space.com and has more than five years' experience as a science journalist based in New York City. She joined Space.com in July 2018, with previous writing published in outlets including Newsweek and Audubon. Meghan earned an MA in science journalism from New York University and a BA in classics from Georgetown University, and in her free time she enjoys reading and visiting museums. Follow her on Twitter at meghanbartels.
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