A massive gas giant orbiting a star about 855 light-years from Earth, WASP-121b may have metal clouds and rain made of liquid gems, according to new research.
A study showing how water atmospherically cycles between the planet's two sides published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Every 30 hours, WASP-121b completes one orbit and is tidally locked, much like the moon is to Earth. That means one side of the planet, the dayside, always faces the star. The other side experiences a permanent night that faces space. "These winds are much faster than our jet stream, and can probably move clouds across the entire planet in about 20 hours," Daylan said. He previously studied the planet using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission.
"Despite the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, we've only been able to study the atmospheres of a small fraction due to the challenging nature of the observations," he said."We're now moving beyond taking isolated snapshots of specific regions of exoplanet atmospheres, to study them as the 3D systems they truly are."
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