The most reflective planet ever found outside of our Solar System is a searing hot globe where metal clouds rain down titanium-colored drops, according to astronomers on Monday. According to recent findings from Europe’s exoplanet-probing Cheops space telescope, this odd world, which is more than 260 light years away from Earth, reflects 80% of the light from its home star. It is the first exoplanet that may be compared to Venus in terms of brightness, which is the brightest object in our night sky after the Moon.
The planet is so near to its star that the side that faces it is a scorching 2,000 degrees Celsius
The LTT9779b planet, which was first identified in 2020, orbits its star in just 19 hours. The planet is so near to its star that the side that faces it is a scorching 2,000 degrees Celsius, which is thought to be far too hot for clouds to form. But LTT9779b appears to possess them. “It was a puzzle,” said Vivien Parmentier, a researcher at France’s Cote d’Azur Observatory and co-author of a recent study published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The scientists “realised we should think about this cloud formation in the same way as condensation forming in a bathroom after a hot shower,” he said in a statement.
He said that LTT9779b’s atmosphere was oversaturated with metal and silicate to the point where metallic clouds developed, similar to how running hot water steams up a bathtub. The planet is unique in various respects despite being around five times the size of Earth. Only rocky planets half the size of Earth or gas giants 10 times its size have been discovered to date that orbit their stars in less than 24 hours. The “Neptune desert” is a place where planets of its size are not intended to exist, but LTT9779b happens to reside there. Parmentier declared, “It’s a planet that shouldn’t exist.
“We expect planets like this to have their atmosphere blown away by their star, leaving behind bare rock.” The planet’s metallic clouds “act like a mirror,” reflecting away light and preventing the atmosphere from being blown away, according to the European Space Agency’s Cheops project scientist Maximilian Guenther. “It’s a bit like a shield, like in those old Star Trek films where they have shields around their ships,” he told AFP.
The study is “a big milestone” since it demonstrates how a planet the size of Neptune might endure in the Neptune desert, he continued. 2019 saw the deployment of the Cheops space observatory from the European Space Agency into Earth’s orbit to study planets found outside of our Solar System. By comparing the light before and after the exoplanet vanished behind its star, it calculated LTT9779b’s reflectiveness.
