Researchers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have observed an extreme planet where they suspect it rains iron. The ultra-hot giant exoplanet has a day side where temperatures climb above 2400°C, high enough to vaporize metals.
Strong winds carry iron vapor to the cooler night side where it condenses into iron droplets. David Ehrenreich, a professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland who led the study, said:
“One could say that this planet gets rainy in the evening, except it rains iron.”
The WASP-76b exoplanet
Professor Ehrenreich led the study, which was published in the journal Nature, of this exotic exoplanet. Known as WASP-76b, it is located some 640 light-years away in the constellation of Pisces.
This strange phenomenon happens because the “iron rain” planet only ever shows one face, its day side, to its parent star, its cooler night side remaining in perpetual darkness. Like the Moon orbiting around Earth, WASP-76b is “tidally locked”: It takes as long to rotate around its axis as it does to go around the star.
On its day side, it receives thousands of times more radiation from its parent star than the Earth does from the Sun. It’s so hot that molecules separate into atoms, and metals like iron evaporate into the atmosphere.
The extreme temperature difference between the day and night sides results in vigorous winds that bring the iron vapor from the ultra-hot day side to the cooler night side, where temperatures decrease to around 1500°C.
Not only does WASP-76b have different day-night temperatures, it also has distinct day-night chemistry, according to the new study. Using the new ESPRESSO instrument on ESO’s VLT in the Chilean Atacama Desert, the astronomers identified for the first time chemical variations on an ultra-hot gas giant planet. They detected a strong signature of iron vapor at the evening border that separates the planet’s day side from its night side. Ehrenreich said:
“Surprisingly, however, we do not see the iron vapour in the morning.” The reason, he says, is that “it is raining iron on the night side of this extreme exoplanet.”
María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, an astrophysicist at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain, and the chair of the ESPRESSO science team, added:
“The observations show that iron vapour is abundant in the atmosphere of the hot day side of WASP-76b. A fraction of this iron is injected into the night side owing to the planet’s rotation and atmospheric winds. There, the iron encounters much cooler environments, condenses and rains down.”
This result was obtained from the very first science observations done with ESPRESSO, in September 2018, by the scientific consortium that built the instrument: a team from Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and ESO.
ESPRESSO — the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations — was originally designed to hunt for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. However, it has proven to be much more versatile. Pedro Figueira, ESPRESSO instrument scientist at ESO in Chile, said:
“We soon realised that the remarkable collecting power of the VLT and the extreme stability of ESPRESSO made it a prime machine to study exoplanet atmospheres.”
Ehrenreich concluded by saying:
“What we have now is a whole new way to trace the climate of the most extreme exoplanets.”
Provided by: ESO [Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.]
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