Among the many exoplanets we ’ve discovered in the Milky Way , there ’s a special class called spicy Jupiters , gas monster planets orbit so near to their stars that their temperature turn over thousands of degrees .
These exoplanets are also tidally locked , take one face constantly front the hotshot while the other is in perpetual wickedness and covered in cloud . A new study , published in theAstrophysical Journal , focus on the twilight regions and their cloud coverages .
The American team look at the phase angle of the exoplanets , and how their light changed as they splay around their genius . For the first clock time , they were capable to jibe real observations of exoplanet ignitor curves fromNASA ’s Kepler telescopewith models of how the clouds should be distributed around these hot Jupiters .
This was possible thanks to the stark difference in temperature between the comparatively cool nighttime - side and the scorching solar day - side , which can have temperatures between 700 ° C and 1,900 ° C ( 1,300 and 3,400 ° F ) .
" The twenty-four hours - Nox radiation contrast is , in fact , wanton to model , " said leading author Vivien Parmentier , a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona , Tucson , in astatement . “ [ The hot Jupiters ] are much comfortable to mould than Jupiter itself , ”
The squad confirmed that for some reason cloud run to amass on the west side of the satellite ' dayside compared to their east side , and by studying all the exoplanets that have shown this behavior ( and their temperatures ) , the team was able-bodied for the first sentence to find out what the clouds are made of .
" swarm composition changes with satellite temperature , " Parmentier tally .
" The offsetting light curves tell the tale of swarm composition . It ’s passing interesting because cloud make-up is very hard to get otherwise . "
The clouds are not made of water system vapor but of alien condensate like aluminum oxide , manganese sulfide , or even branding iron . Sulfide clouds might be dominant for nerveless raging Jupiters , but the hottest planets will credibly have oxide or metallic cloud around them .
Although we have discovered thousands of them , exoplanets remain very mysterious and in most case , like this one , they are completely different from what we see in the Solar System .