EUROPE: A massive and blazing hot distant exoplanet has a stratosphere, a “sunscreen” layer that’s one of the main layers of our own planet’s atmosphere, astronomers say.
The atmosphere layer on the planet cataloged as WASP-33b was detected during observations using the Hubble Space Telescope, they report.
A stratosphere layer in an atmosphere includes molecules capable of absorbing both ultraviolet and visible light, serving as a kind of planetary “sunscreen,” they explain.
There has been considerable debate about whether such molecules could exist or survive in the atmosphere of massive, extremely hot exoplanets like WASP-33b, whose gaseous surface has a temperature of 3,200 degrees Centigrade, almost 5,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Some of these planets are so hot in their upper atmospheres, they’re essentially boiling off into space,” says Avi Mandell, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
At these temperatures, we don’t necessarily expect to find an atmosphere that has molecules that can lead to these multilayered structures,” says Mandell, who co-authored a study on WASP-33B appearing in the Astrophysical Journal.
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