Giant Alien World With Two Suns and a Furious Sandstorm Found by Astronomers

 

Artist's impression of VVHS 1256 b, with its swirling cloudy atmosphere and two suns. (NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted/STScI)

One of the weirdest alien worlds we have yet discovered is only 70 light-years away from Earth.

 

It has an orbital period of 10,000 years, 20 Jupiter masses, temperatures that could easily melt metal, and two stars it orbits. Oh, and it's being destroyed by a relentless, violent sandstorm.

The James Webb Space Telescope has allowed astronomers to make the most precise observations of the planetary-mass object to date, showing turbulent clouds of silicate grains swirling in the atmosphere of the planet VHS 1256 b.

 

The crew also pinpointed many of the elements that made up the atmosphere of VHS 1256 b. There have been clear detections of methane, carbon monoxide, and water, as well as extra carbon dioxide evidence.

 

According to astronomer Paul Mollière of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, "no other telescope has identified so many features at once for a single target." We are able to decipher the planet's changing cloud and weather systems by looking at numerous molecules in a single spectrum obtained by the JWST.

VHS 1256 b is a bit of a mystery. Its mass lies between large planets and brown dwarfs, "failed stars," which aren't massive enough to fuse hydrogen but can do so in their cores with deuterium, a heavier hydrogen isotope with lower fusion temperatures and pressures than hydrogen.

 

The two kinds of objects are believed to form quite differently. Typically, brown dwarfs collapse from a dense knot of material in a cloud of gas and dust and then take in more material to expand. This is how stars typically form. Deuterium fusion is a stage in the growth process that some stars, such as brown dwarfs, skip and continue to exist as they are.

On the other hand, it is believed that planets develop from the bottom up, starting with the material that remains after a star has formed and clumping together to create a planet. It is assumed that this material is typically located fairly near to the star. VHS 1256 b's two suns are separated from it by a large distance in orbit, which is suggestive but not conclusive that it developed by cloud collapse.

 

Theoretically, planets could also develop from the cloud collapse model; it is thought that a cloud collapse object would have a minimum mass of one Jupiter. The deuterium-burning mass limit is, therefore, the boundary between a planet and a brown dwarf, leaving VHS 1256 b's exact nature unclear.

But it was that vast distance that made it possible to make such amazing observations.

 

As an excellent target for Webb, VHS 1256 b is about four times farther from its stars than Pluto is from the Sun, according to astronomer Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona, who also attended as crew leader. That indicates that the planet's radiation is not diluted by that of its stars.

 

The infrared and near-infrared, which contains thermal radiation, is the observational range of JWST. And VHS 1256 b is still quite heated from the formation process despite being only 150 million years old. The temperature of its atmosphere, where the sand particles are located, is 830 degrees Celsius. (1,526 degrees Fahrenheit).

 

The infrared spectrum of VHS 1256 b. (NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted/STScI, B. Miles/UA, S. Hinkley/UOE, B. Biller/UE, A. Skemer/UCSC)

Its high temperatures and low gravity are what cause its clouds to be so erratic. Researchers examined the light captured by JWST, closely examining the spectrum to identify the characteristics caused by different substances absorbing particular wavelengths.

They used this method to identify the different gases they discovered in the object's atmosphere, as well as the shifting sand particles that are probably made of enstatite, forsterite, or quartz.

 

The data was so comprehensive that researchers were also able to distinguish between various grain sizes, from smaller grains like smoke particles to larger grains like sand. According to the researchers' theory, these heavier larger grains rain back down into the interior as smaller particles ascend because they are too heavy to stay in the upper atmosphere.

The world's brightness varies dramatically as a result over the course of the planet's 22-hour day, which raises the possibility that silicate clouds are a prevalent mechanism for producing variations in brown dwarfs. The team thinks that other brown dwarfs could readily make the same observations, which could teach us more about these peculiar objects.

 

Furthermore, VHS 1256 B has provided us a lot to think about.

This is just the start of a massive modelling endeavour to comprehend the complex data from JWST, so it is not the last word on this planet.

Reference: sciencealert.com

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