Science
Related: About this forumThis strange lava-rich alien planet is making itself a new atmosphere
By Meghan Bartels a day ago
The Hubble Space Telescope made the find.
Scientists think they've spied an alien world that lost its atmosphere then conjured itself a new one.
That's according to a new analysis of Hubble Space Telescope observations gathered in 2017 of a planet dubbed GJ 1132 b. The world tightly orbits a red dwarf star located about 41 light-years from Earth, completing one circle every 1.5 Earth days and soaking up lots of stellar radiation in the process. And now, scientists think they see signs of a secondary atmosphere, one that was born of the exoplanet itself long after the planet formed.
"It's super exciting because we believe the atmosphere that we see now was regenerated, so it could be a secondary atmosphere," study co-author Raissa Estrela, an exoplanet scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, said in a statement.
An artist's depiction of the exoplanet GJ 1132 b, which orbits a red dwarf star about 41 light-years away from Earth and may sport lava continuously oozing up from cracks in its crust. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, and R. Hurt (IPAC/Caltech))
"We first thought that these highly irradiated planets could be pretty boring because we believed that they lost their atmospheres," Estrela said. "But we looked at existing observations of this planet with Hubble and said, 'Oh no, there is an atmosphere there.'"
More:
https://www.space.com/hubble-finds-lava-exoplanet-with-second-atmosphere
Shermann
(7,358 posts)I'm sick of being so hot in this one and breathing in all these cow farts.
SCantiGOP
(13,856 posts)Originally referred to volcanic emissions, and was transferred to refer to Hell later.
So we might want to wait a few million years before we try to colonize this planet.