A Planet Nearly 700 Light-Years Away Has Clouds that Form on Its Cooler Morning Side and Disappear by the Time the Atmosphere Reaches Its Scorching Evening Side. James Webb Has Given Astronomers Their Clearest Look yet at a World Where the Clouds May Be Made From Rock-Forming Minerals Rather than Water.

A planet nearly 700 light-years away has clouds that form on its cooler morning side and disappear by the time the atmosphere reaches its scorching evening side. James Webb has given astronomers their clearest look yet at a world where the clouds may be made from rock-forming minerals rather than water.

WASP-94A b is too distant for the James Webb Space Telescope to photograph as a weather globe. Yet astronomers have separated two narrow slices of its atmosphere and found radically different skies. One edge is cooler and cloud-covered. The other is hotter, clearer and marked by strong water-vapour absorption. The planet is a hot Jupiter nearly 700 light-years away in Microscopium. It circles its star in roughly four days and is thought to be ti…

The JWST Early Release Science Program for Direct Observations of Exoplanetary Systems VIII: Patchy Forsterite and Enstatite Clouds in the Atmosphere of VHS 1256 b.

[astro-ph.EP] JWST defines a new era for the data-driven approach of retrieval modelling, which has become a cornerstone tool for the statistical inference of exoplanetary and brown dwarf properties. The […] The post The JWST Early Release Science Program for Direct Observations of Exoplanetary Systems VIII: Patchy Forsterite and Enstatite Clouds in the Atmosphere of VHS 1256 b. appeared first on Astrobiology.