NEW YORK: Stratosphere has been discovered on a distant blazing-hot exoplanet dubbed WASP-33b by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope – a discovery that scientists claim will enable them to learn more about the composition of a planet and how it formed.
This discovery was unexpected as scientists were unsure whether such an atmospheric layer would be found in the atmospheres of large, extremely hot planets in other star systems.
Though stratosphere would require a book of its own to describe, here is a little primer. In Earth’s atmosphere, the stratosphere sits above the troposphere — the turbulent, active-weather region that reaches from the ground to the altitude where nearly all clouds top out. In the troposphere, the temperature is warmer at the bottom — ground level — and cools down at higher altitudes.
The stratosphere is just the opposite. In this layer, the temperature increases with altitude, a phenomenon called temperature inversion. On Earth, temperature inversion occurs because ozone in the stratosphere absorbs much of the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation, preventing it from reaching the surface, protecting the biosphere, and therefore warming the stratosphere instead.
Similar temperature inversions occur in the stratospheres of other planets in our solar system, such as Jupiter and Saturn. In these cases, the culprit is a different group of molecules called hydrocarbons. Neither ozone nor hydrocarbons, however, could survive at the high temperatures of most known exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system. This leads to a debate as to whether stratospheres would exist on them at all.
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