James Webb Space Telescope detects enormous clouds on an Exoplanet in unparalleled detail

 

Methane and carbon dioxide are also consist  in the exoplanet's atmosphere.

A mysterious alien world covered in clouds of silicate grains that resemble sand has been discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope's NIRSpec and MIRI sensors found the exoplanet, which was described in a new paper as the first detection of its sort. Scientists discovered indications of silicate-rich clouds surrounding a brown dwarf that was almost 20 times the size of Jupiter. The discovery confirms certain past theories on these strange planet-like worlds.

 Brown dwarfs are weird objects that are just a little bit too massive to be planets but not quite big enough to ignite into stars. While brown dwarfs cannot burn normal hydrogen, they can burn deuterium to generate their own light and heat (a less common isotope of hydrogen that contains an extra neutron).

 The concerned brown dwarf is known as VHS 1256 b and is located 72 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Corvus, or the crow, in the southern sky. It circles two tiny red dwarf stars. The weird exoplanet was found in 2016 and has baffled astronomers ever since because of its reddish glow. They thought that some glow of atmosphere might be responsible for the shine. According to Forbes, observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have now supported previous predictions, showing that VHS 1256 b must be wrapped in thick clouds filled with silicate grains that resemble sand.

Water, methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium, and potassium were also found by Webb in the atmosphere of VHS 1256 b.

As the project's main researcher and an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine, Brittany Miles said in an email to Space.com, "We will know more from iterations on the data reduction." It appears to be fairly consistent with theoretical predictions thus far.

The Webb information were so precise that they proved how the ratio of the different gases changes throughout the atmosphere of VHS 1256 b, indicating that the atmosphere is not still but rather wild and turbulent.

According to co-author of the paper Sasha Hinkley, an astronomer at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, "in a tranquil atmosphere, there is an expected ratio of, say, methane and carbon monoxide." However, we are discovering that this ratio is highly skewed in the atmospheres of many exoplanets, indicating that there is turbulent vertical mixing in these atmospheres that is bringing up carbon dioxide from deep down to mix with methane at a higher altitude.

Given that VHS 1256 b is small for a brown dwarf, the body is probably still rather young. The exoplanet orbits its two parent stars at a distance of 360 sun-Earths, taking 17,000 years to complete its oval-shaped orbit.

 Although the paper has not yet been released, an early draught is now accessible on the preprint server arXiv.org.