Discovery led by UC Santa Cruz Ph.D. of daily cloud cycle on a hot Jupiter exoplanet provides unique window into its make-up.
Discovery led by UC Santa Cruz Ph.D. of daily cloud cycle on a hot Jupiter exoplanet provides unique window into its make-up.
For students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, fog is an all-too-familiar dynamic that shrouds and ebbs from campus over the course of a day. But while working toward his Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, Sagnick Mukherjee’s head was in the clouds of atmospheres hundreds of light years from Earth.
Mukherjee models planetary atmosphere-interior interactions to probe persistent mysteries about worlds beyond our solar system. And in his newest study, using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), he and a team of researchers are among the first to report the detection of cloud cycles on a Hot Jupiter exoplanet named WASP-94A b.
On this gas giant, nearly 700 light years away from Earth, sand clouds form every morning but clear up by nightfall. By isolating the clouds, researchers can more accurately measure the planet’s atmosphere and provide one of the clearest pictures to date of the planet’s composition—a significant advance in planetary science.
Read More: University of California – Santa Cruz
Photo Credit: makabera via Pixabay
