TIME.CO, Jakarta – James Webb Telescope discovered winds at thousands of kilometers per hour blowing showers of tiny quartz crystals through a torrid silicate-containing atmosphere planet called a distant gas giant WASP-17b.
“We know this from observations [Teleskop Luar Angkasa] Hubble that there must be aerosols in the form of small particles that form clouds or fog, in the atmosphere of WASP-17b,” said Daniel Grant of the University of Bristol in England and leader of a new study on the discovery, as quoted by Space last week.However, the researchers did not think the particles were made of quartz.
Quartz is a form of silicate, which is a mineral rich in silica and oxygen. Silicates are very common. All rocky bodies in the solar system are made of silicates, and silicates have previously been detected in the atmospheres of hot Jupiter exoplanets. In this case, however, the olivine and pyroxene crystals are more complex and rich in magnesium.
“We fully expected to see magnesium silicate,” said Hannah Wakeford of Bristol. “But what we are looking at are most likely the building blocks, i.e. the tiny seed particles needed to form the larger silicate grains we find on cooler exoplanets and brown dwarfs.”
The planet Sekila WASP-17b
The planet orbits every 3.7 days at a distance of just 7.8 million kilometers from its star, which is 1,300 light years from Earth. WASP-17b is so close to its parent star that daytime temperatures reach 1,500 degrees Celsius.
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Because the atmosphere on this exoplanet is so hot, its effective area has expanded to about 285,000 kilometers, or twice the diameter of Jupiter. although WASP-17b only has about half the mass of Jupiter. WASP-17b is one of the “puffiest” planets ever known, and its puffy atmosphere makes it a good target for the James Webb Space Telescope.
In this research, Grant and fellow astronomers observed WASP-17b pass by its star using JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). As the exoplanet moves in front of its star from JWST’s perspective, MIRI detects starlight that is blocked by the planet itself, but partially absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere. The measurements produce what is called a transmission spectrum, in which certain wavelengths are blocked by certain atmospheric molecules.
Grant explains how silicate crystals were first incorporated into planetary atmospheres. “WASP-17b is very hot and the pressure at which quartz crystals form in the upper atmosphere is only about a thousandth of what we experience at the Earth’s surface,” he said. According to him, under conditions like these, solid crystals can form directly from the gas, without first passing through the liquid phase.
These results were published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. The 15-page diary was published on October 20, 2023.
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