Washington | Wednesday
ASTRONOMERS for the first time have directly detected the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system, using the Hubble space telescope, Nasa announced on Tuesday.
The roughly Jupiter-sized planet is located in the constellation Pegasus some 150 light years from Earth. It orbits around a star similar to our sun, labelled HD 209458.
”This opens up an exciting phase of extra-solar planet exploration, where we can begin to compare and contrast the atmospheres of planets around other stars,” an enthusiastic David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, told a press conference.
To date, astronomers have identified some 70 planets outside our solar system, including about 15 ”hot-Jupiter”-type planets such as the one spotted by the Hubble.
Unlike Jupiter, the newly-detected planet is very close to its sun, at a distance of about 6,4-million kilometres.
Its atmosphere is very hot, up to 1 100 degrees , Charbonneau added.
Observations by the earth-orbiting Hubble telescope show evidence of salt on the planet, which has a mass of about 70 times that of Jupiter and 220 times that of Earth.
The ”very thick” atmosphere of the planet rules out the possibility that life as we know it on Earth exists there, said Timothy Brown of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. – Sapa