Saturday, January 4, 2014

Planet GJ 1214b: density, previously unknown clouds envelop super-Earth - Hamburger Evening Gazette

03:01:14

In the atmosphere, researchers found from Chicago potassium chloride or zinc sulfide, which completely obscure the planet 42 light years away with the number of GJ 1214b.

Photo: pa / dpa

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The representation of a super-Earth (left)

Chicago. Researchers have screened the atmosphere of a so-called super-Earth with another planet and have encountered there on a dense cloud cover. The 42 light years distant planet with the number GJ 1214b is completely veiled, as Laura Kreidberg report from the University of Chicago and her colleagues in the journal “Nature”. It is the first time according to information that the atmosphere of a super-Earth has been clearly characterized. “We go from very different types of clouds from, as you would expect on Earth”, Kreidberg explained in a statement. At a temperature of around 230 degrees Celsius, the super-Earth enveloped probably clouds of potassium chloride or zinc sulfide.

as super-Earths Astronomers call planets around other stars, so exoplanets that are larger than Earth but smaller than the gas planet Neptune in our solar system. GJ1214b has about 2.7 times the diameter of the Earth and orbits a dwarf sun in the constellation Ophiuchus. All 38 hours of pulling the exoplanet seen from Earth in its orbit just before its host star over. Then the starlight shines through the planet’s atmosphere, so astronomers can study their properties based on a so-called transmission spectrum.

The researchers focused the Hubble Space Telescope, a total of 96 hours on the distant planet and found that atmospheric gases can not identify in the transmission spectrum. The only explanation for this is a dense cloud cover that can happen no starlight through the atmosphere. In the same way a second team with Hubble studied the atmosphere of the exoplanet GJ 436b about neptune large and also found evidence of a dense cloud cover, like Heather Knutson of the California Institute of Technology, and colleagues in the same issue of “Nature”. As the super-Earth GJ 1214b circles too GJ436b much closer to its host star than the planets of our solar system, so it is very warm to him.

(AP)

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