Jupiter-like exoplanet with 20X shorter orbit than Earth found with a bizarre atmosphere

An international team of astronomers has stumbled upon a new discovery about an exoplanet that has multiple layers in its atmospheres like Earth but with very bizarre characteristics. Located 322 light-years away from Earth, the planet named WASP-189b has characteristics like Jupiter and is an extremely hot planet. 

Consisting of experts from the University of Bern, the University of Geneva and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS, the team said that their discovery would help astronomers understand the complexities of exoplanets including those like the Earth.

What's so bizarre about this planet?

The exoplanet was discovered in 2020 using the CHEOPS space telescope and observation revealed that it is circling its star closer than the Earth orbits the sun and has a surface temperature of 3200 degrees Celsius during daytime. However, it is now that the astronomers, using the HARPS spectrograph at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, have closely studied WASP-189b's atmosphere. 

While measuring the light emerging from the planet's atmosphere, the astronomers found gasses containing iron, chromium, vanadium, magnesium and manganese and found that some of these gasses were absorbing the sunlight. Moreover, the scientists were also surprised at the discovery of gas containing titanium oxide, which is scarce on Earth but might be playing a role similar to our planet's ozone layer. "Titanium oxide absorbs short wave radiation, such as ultraviolet radiation. Its detection could therefore indicate a layer in the atmosphere of WASP-189b that interacts with the stellar irradiation similarly to how the Ozone layer does on Earth," study co-author Kevin Heng said as per the University of Bern's report. 

The experts further say that they have noted alterations in the "fingerprints" of the gasses in WASP-189b's atmosphere, similar to water vapour and ozone on Earth that exist in different layers and hint the same for this exoplanet. "In the past, astronomers often assumed that the atmospheres of exoplanets exist as a uniform layer and try to understand it as such. But our results demonstrate that even the atmospheres of intensely irradiated giant gas planets have complex three-dimensional structures," study co-author Jens Hoeijmakers said. Moreover, Heng said that there is a need to appreciate the three-dimensional nature of such exoplanet atmospheres to fully understand these planetary bodies. 

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