Hot Jupiter In Retrograde: Scientists Find New Planet With Weird Weather Around Fast Star

Astronomers have made a rare find of a type of exoplanet called a “hot Jupiter,” a planet outside our solar system that has similarities to our largest neighbor but is orbiting close to a hot star.

According to a paper on arXiv, a scientific publication database hosted by Cornell University, the new exoplanet has a diameter about 1.5 times the size of the real Jupiter but being so close to its host, it completes an orbit every two days, compared to Jupiter’s roughly 12 years. And it does that in retrograde, orbiting in the opposite direction of how the host star rotates.

Read: 6 of the Coolest Exoplanets We’ve Found

Revolving so close to a star is what gives this class of exoplanets their name — the lack of distance from its heat source creates a high surface temperature.

This one, dubbed WASP-167b/KELT-13b, might weigh as much as eight times the mass of our Jupiter and is going around almost as fast as its star can rotate. But the fact that it can’t catch up with the star is something that makes the exoplanet find even rarer: The research says that “there appears to be a dearth of hot Jupiters orbiting very fast rotators, such that the star rotates faster than the planetary orbit.”

The uniqueness of the star, which is 60 percent bigger than the sun, doesn’t stop there. It’s pulsating every four hours and has a temperature of nearly 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And according to a report on the research, the 1.3 billion-year-old star is “one of the hottest and most rapidly rotating stars known to host a hot Jupiter exoplanet.”

Scientists don’t know a lot about hot Jupiters, but they have some ideas about what the weather is like on those scorching planets. For starters, NASA says, the same side of the planet always faces the star, so one side is in perpetual daylight while the other lives in darkness. Daytime temperatures could soar to 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit and the night side would have heavy cloud coverage.

And those clouds could be made of stone — “hot Jupiters are far too hot for water-vapor clouds like those on Earth,” according to NASA. “Instead, clouds on these planets are likely formed as exotic vapors condense to form minerals, chemical compounds like aluminum oxide, or even metals, like iron.” On the hottest of the hot Jupiters, it would turn to rock.

Scientists taking a model of weather on the real Jupiter and turning up the heat to match one of these extreme exoplanets found that the temperature difference could take Jupiter’s most famous feature, its constant, swirling storm called the Great Red Spot, and grow it as large as a quarter of the size of the planet. There could even be more than one of those giant red superstorms.

See also:

Alien Super-Jupiter Orbits a Cool Star

The Aliens Are Probably Swimming, Not Walking Around