As if its deadly climate wasn’t bad enough, scientists said this week that a Jupiter-sized planet 64 light-years from Earth smells like rotten eggs.
HD 189733 b is an exoplanet, meaning it is located outside our solar system. The atmosphere has clouds “laced with glass”, and that glass falls like rain, according to NASA. In a study published Monday in the journal Natureresearchers said the atmosphere also contains traces of hydrogen sulfide, causing the smell.
Dangerous wind, temperature and rain on ‘hot Jupiter’
HD 189733 b is what is known as hot Jupiter planet, which are gas giants with extremely high temperatures. They closely orbit their stars, which makes them “infernally hot,” according to NASA.
It takes just 2.2 days for HD 189733 b to orbit its star, and because of its proximity to its star, it has a surface temperature of 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, scientists said. For comparison, Jupiter – the one in our solar system – takes about 12 Earth years to orbit the sun.
NASA refers to HD 189733 b as a “nightmare world” and a “killer you never see coming.”
“To the human eye, this distant planet appears bright blue. But any space traveler who mistakes it for Earth’s friendly skies would be sorely mistaken,” the space agency said. he wrote in a 2016 post. “The weather in this world is deadly.”
Winds blow up to 5,400 miles per hour. This howling wind blows over the dangerous glass rain, with NASA writing that “getting caught in the rain on this planet is more than an inconvenience; It’s death by a thousand cuts.”
Studying HD 189733 b
The James Webb Space Telescope was used to study the deadly exoplanet, which was discovered in 2005. Researchers say the new discovery of a smelly atmosphere gives scientists new clues about how sulfur can influence both the interiors and atmospheres of gaseous worlds. outside Earth’s solar system. .
“We are not looking for life on this planet because it is too hot, but finding hydrogen sulfide is a stepping stone to finding this molecule on other planets and gaining more understanding of how different types of planets form,” said Guangwei Fu, an astrophysicist. from Johns Hopkins University who led the research, said in a statement.
Studying sulfur could help scientists understand more about how planets are made and what they are made of, Fu said. In the future, Fu and his research team aim to track sulfur on other exoplanets.
“We want to know how these types of planets got there, and understanding their atmospheric composition will help us answer that question,” Fu said.
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