Astronomers have found a planet with “titanium” clouds in the atmosphere
MOSCOW, September 13 — RIA Novosti. European astronomers have discovered an extremely unusual exoplanet whose atmosphere clouds hanging from the titanium oxide — a powerful greenhouse “gas” that can heat up its upper layers to the hellishly high temperatures, and published their observations in the journal Nature.
“The presence of titanium oxide in the atmosphere of WASP-19b may very unusually influence how heated its different layers and how to move the streams of air in it. The fact that we managed so to study it in detail, very pleasing to us and says that we can carry out similar observations for the other planets,” said Ryan MacDonald (Ryan MacDonald) from the University of Cambridge (UK).
“Hot Jupiter” heated astronomers call gas giants that are far from their stars only 2.2−75 million kilometers. In the Solar system, even mercury is coming to the star closer than 46 million kilometers, and therefore, the atmospheres of these planets reign really hellish temperatures in the 1000-1300 degrees Kelvin.
Finding such planets is much easier than other heavenly bodies, and they make up most of the known exoplanets. The discovery of “hot Jupiters” for the first time, scientists put before the fact that the atmosphere on these planets may consist of very exotic materials.
For example, in recent years, were discovered on the planet with lead and glass clouds and air, consisting of evaporated metals and rocks in the upper layers which is sometimes the rain of rubies and sapphires.
Relatively recently, says McDonald, scientists have discovered several “hot Jupiters,” whose atmosphere was red-hot to even higher temperatures, in excess of 2.5 thousand degrees Kelvin, and had an unusual structure — they were hot on the outside and colder inside, like the stratosphere of the Earth. The presence of such a layer on them led scientists to assume that these “hot Jupiters” warms up some heavy duty greenhouse effect, which can produce two chemicals — titanium oxide or vanadium oxide.