Sizzling Worlds Vaporize Most of the Dust in Their Atmospheres
"When you're hot, you're hot!" crooned country singer Jerry Reed in a top 1971 pop music song. Hubble astronomers might change the lyrics to: "when you're hot, you're super-hot!"
This comes from studying planets that are so precariously close to their parent star they are being roasted at seething temperatures above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It's raining vaporized rock on one planet, and another planet's atmosphere is being "sunburned" by intense ultraviolet radiation from its star. This makes the upper atmosphere hotter rather than cooler.
This Hubble research provides dramatic new insights into the vast range of atmospheric conditions on other worlds, and helps astronomers build better theories for making themselves "exoplanet weather forecasters." Before thousands of planets around other stars were discovered, astronomers were limited to doing comparative planetology only to the handful of worlds in our solar system.
As oddball as the super-hot Jupiters are, this kind of research helps pave the way to better understanding the atmospheres of cooler exoplanets, especially potentially inhabitable terrestrial planets. The super-hot Jupiters are uninhabitable, of course, and any visitors would need to wear sunscreen SPF 10,000.
Find additional articles, images, and videos at HubbleSite.org
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