Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that the well-known “pink planet” harbors a salty surprise and strange atmospheric chemistry. This discovery represents an advance in the study of cold objects outside the solar system.
GJ504b was first discovered in 2013, orbiting Planet A A star resembling the sun It is located about 57 light-years from Earth. With a mass about 25 times that of JupiterDespite its moniker, this pink planet may not be a planet at all. It may instead be a Brown dwarfa failed star that formed like a star but was unable to gather enough mass to do so Nuclear fusion to Hydrogen to helium In essence. Hence, astronomers refer to it as a “planetary mass companion,” which means a planet-sized object orbiting its parent star.
GJ504b remains one of the coldest planetary-mass companions ever detected using ground-based telescopes, with a temperature of about 550°F (290°C). Although this still makes it hot enough to bake bread. now, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) The data reveals that it contains a key bread-making ingredient, too: salt found in its atmospheric clouds, unlike anything astronomers have seen before.
“The pink planet is the coldest companion ever discovered using terrestrial instruments,” said team leader Anish Babraj of Northwestern University. He said in a statement. “Several teams around the world carried out follow-up observations to study its light, but it was too faint for ground-based instruments. This made it an ideal target for JWST.
“When we finally got its spectrum, it looked immediately interesting. But once we started digging deeper into the data, we realized it wasn’t like anything we’d analyzed before.”
The pink planet is cold and old
The team studied this companion planet by measuring its faint electromagnetic radiation emissions and filtering out the bright glow of its parent star.
They found that the relative coldness of the pink planet is a result of the planet’s age. both of them Gas giant planets Brown dwarfs are born in extreme temperatures but cool as they grow older. This new research estimates that GJ504b is between 2.5 billion and 4 billion years old.
Transforming the light from the pink planet into an individual WavelengthsThe team was also able to determine its chemical composition. This is possible because the elements absorb and emit light at distinct wavelengths, meaning they leave “imprints” on the light that passes through their atmospheres.
“In the past, other astronomers have observed the companion for an entire night using some of the largest telescopes in the world to obtain the spectrum,” Baburaj said. “And they couldn’t see the object. With the James Webb Space Telescope, our entire observation took about two hours, and we were successful.”
Data from the James Webb Space Telescope revealed a rich mixture of chemicals in the pink planet’s atmosphere, which includes water, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia. However, these observations did not match the model of the companion planet’s atmosphere until the team took into account something completely unexpected: salt clouds deep in the atmosphere.
“We ran cloud simulations, and the results were consistent with what we know about cold planets,” Baburaj said. “We tried three different types of clouds, and salt clouds were the best. When we took salt clouds into account, the signature of molecules hidden deep in the atmosphere was subjected to the companion. Then, the results became physically possible.”
“This is the first time we have found that salt clouds play a crucial role in interpreting an object’s spectrum. It is a good reminder to take clouds into account in our models.”
Although this mystery can be solved, there are still questions about GJ504b that will only be resolved through further investigation. The pink planet appears to be unusually rich in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which astronomers call metals. This means that the team still cannot determine the origin of the pink planet; Did it form like a planet or like a star?
This means that they are not quite ready to determine whether GJ504b is a gas giant planet, a brown dwarf, or should it be a pink dwarf?
The team’s research was published on Thursday (June 18) in Astronomical magazine.
