The United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has discovered water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system . It is tau Boo b, an exotic planet classified as “hot Jupiter”, which orbits very close to its star tau Bootis and is about 50 light years from Earth . The work has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters .
It is called “hot Jupiter” to all that extrasolar planet that orbits very close to a star. Unlike our Jupiter (which is quite cold and with an orbit that lasts 12 years), tau Boo b orbits its star every 3.3 days and heats up to extreme temperatures due to its proximity to its star. In these hot conditions, water can only be found in the form of steam .
The team has used a sophisticated technique that works in the infrared wavelength spectrum, in which the aqueous composition becomes visible, to directly detect the planet and reliably demonstrate the presence of water in its atmosphere. The data was collected by the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii . In addition to the presence of water, experts discovered that the mass of this exoplanet is 6 times greater than that of Jupiter.
“The detection of water vapor in tau Boo b is an exciting and important step in understanding the composition of these exotic planets. Our result also demonstrates the power of this technique to measure water and other molecules in the atmospheres of planets, giving us a new tool for studying the nature and evolution of extrasolar planets “, says John Carr, a researcher at the division. remote sensing of the NRL and co-author of the study.
Image Credit: David Aguilar, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
