Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
WASP-94A b is a hot and dense gas giant orbiting one of the stars in a binary system 690 years from Earth. In a new study in Science, scientists led by Sagnick Mukherjee, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, used the James Webb Space Telescope to determine what the weather looks like out there.
The closure of the tides means that there is no longer a difference in temperature between day and night that is spread across the globe. Mukherjee said: “We wanted to know how these planets behave. “Are they static or dynamic? Is he windy? Are they cloudy?” His team found that, on WASP-94A b, it is cloudy in the morning, but the sky is bright in the evening. The fact that we did not know this means that we may have received the chemistry of this and many other exoplanets surprisingly wrong.
Average space
WASP-94A b has a mass less than half that of Jupiter but has a diameter that is 70 percent larger. “This means that the Earth has a small density, and its atmosphere extends into space, which makes it easier to see,” explains Mukherjee. When astronomers study these types of phenomena, they often rely on transmission spectroscopy. By measuring the amount of light that filters through a planet’s atmosphere as it passes in front of its star, they can determine its composition.
The problem with this method is that the light passing through the entire surface of the Earth was uniform, as if its atmosphere were a single ball of gas. For tightly closed planets, this was a great simplification.
In closed countries, there is a large variation in temperature between day and night, which often leads to a difference in atmospheric pressure between day and night. This difference, combined with the Coriolis effect resulting from the slow rotation of the planet, causes a phenomenon called equatorial super-rotation. This is where the winds at the equator blow east faster than the Earth’s rotation. The orbital models predicted this to be the case for WASP-94B a.
