The Hubble Telescope observed the cloudy weather on a far-away planet; and predicts the future will look largely similar.
This is the first time researchers have "definitively characterized" the weather outlook on a super-Earth orbiting a star outside of out solar system, a University of Chicago news release reported. The planet is located about 40 light-years away from our solar system.
The planet, dubbed GJ 1214b, is considered a super-Earth because its mass is somewhere in between that of Earth's and Neptune's. Super-Earths are believed to be the most plentiful type of planet in the Milky Way, although none exist in our own solar system.
Past observations of GJ 1214b have suggested the planet's atmosphere consisted of water vapor or high-hanging clouds of some sort.
Recently researchers were able to confirm the existence of clouds with data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
The project was considered to be the "largest Hubble program ever devoted to studying a single exoplanet," the news release reported.
"We really pushed the limits of what is possible with Hubble to make this measurement," Laura Kreidberg, a third-year graduate student and first author of the new paper said. "This advance lays the foundation for characterizing other Earths with similar techniques."
"I think it's very exciting that we can use a telescope like Hubble that was never designed with this in mind, do these kinds of observations with such exquisite precision, and really nail down some property of a small planet orbiting a distant star," Jacob Bean, an assistant professor and the project's principal investigator, said.
The first observations of the planet were made using a ground-based telescope; the findings suggested its atmosphere was composed of water vapor or hydrogen and high-altitude clouds.
The Hubble observations did not detect a "chemical fingerprint" in the planet's atmosphere, which ruled out a cloudless atmosphere made up of " water vapor, methane, nitrogen, carbon monoxide, or carbon dioxide."
While the composition of of the high-altitude clouds is still unknown, the researchers suggested they could be a scalding 450 degrees Fahrenheit and be made up of potassium chloride or zinc sulfide.
"You would expect very different kinds of clouds to form than you would expect, say, on Earth," Kreidberg said.
