Astronomers have discovered the most distant object ever found in our solar system.
The planetoid — the term for a small chunk of rock or dust or ice orbiting the sun — is appropriately nicknamed “Farfarout,” after the previous record-holder, “Farout,” which was discovered by the same astronomers in 2018. After years of observing the object’s trajectory across the sky, that team of researchers announced on Wednesday that they could confidently say Farfarout is, well, much farther out than any solar-system object seen before.
Farfarout is 132 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, meaning it’s 132 times farther from the sun than Earth is, and about four times as far as Pluto. It takes about 1,000 years for the planetoid to complete one orbit around the sun.
The researchers estimate that Farfarout is about 250 miles (400 kilometers) across, which would place it on the low end of being a dwarf planet like Pluto.
“The discovery of Farfarout shows our increasing ability to map the outer solar system and observe farther and farther toward the fringes of our solar system,” Scott Sheppard, one of the astronomers who discovered the object, said in a press release. Sheppard works as a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science.
Solar system distances to scale, showing the newly discovered planetoid, “Farfarout,” compared to other known solar system objects.
Roberto Molar Candanosa, Scott S. Sheppard (Carnegie Institution for Science) and Brooks Bays (University of Hawaiʻi)
“Only with the advancements in the last few years of large digital cameras on very large telescopes has it been possible to efficiently discover very distant objects like Farfarout,” he added. “Even though some of these distant objects are quite large — the size of dwarf planets — they are very faint because of their extreme distances from the Sun. Farfarout is just the tip of the iceberg of solar system objects in the very distant solar system.”
Finding and studying other similarly distant objects could help scientists determine whether there’s an unidentified massive planet hiding in the outskirts of our solar system. Scientists have found hints of such a planet, often referred to as Planet Nine or Planet X, in the distant dark. These clues come in the form of smaller objects whose orbital paths appear skewed.
Farfarout most likely cannot contribute to that effort, however, because Neptune appears to have significantly altered its orbit.
A snippet of a 1,000-year orbit
This image of Farfarout (identified with blue markers) was taken with the Subaru Telescope on January 15, 2018.
S. Sheppard
Farfarout crosses Neptune’s path each time it loops around the sun, and its orbit is elongated in an oval shape. At one point in the cycle, it comes as close to our star as 27 AU. But is also gets as far from the sun as 175 AU. Scientists think this strange orbit is due to Neptune’s powerful gravitational pull.
“Farfarout’s orbital dynamics can help us understand how Neptune formed and evolved, as Farfarout was likely thrown into the outer solar system by getting too close to Neptune in the distant past,” Chad Trujillo, an astronomer at Northern Arizona University who co-discovered the new object, said in the release. “Farfarout will likely interact with Neptune again in the future since their orbits still intersect.”
The Subaru Telescope, located atop Hawaii’s Maunakea, first spotted the planetoid in January 2018.
“All we knew was that the object appeared to be very distant at the time of discovery,” Sheppard said.
It took years of observation to realize just how far away it was. Because Farfarout takes so long to orbit the sun, it moves very slowly across the sky. Astronomers had to observe it for years in order to get enough data to calculate its trajectory.
The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center officially designated Farfarout as object “2018 AG37” on Wednesday. The planetoid will receive a more official name later, after further observations enable scientists to iron out its precise orbital path.
In the awful wake of an oil spill, it’s typically the smallest of organisms who do most of the cleaning up. Surprisingly, scientists know very little about the tools these tiny clean-up crews have at their disposal.
But now, thanks to a new study, researchers have uncovered a whole new cycle of natural hydrocarbon emissions and recycling facilitated by a diverse range of tiny organisms – which could help us better understand how some microbes have the power to clean up the mess an oil spill leaves in the ocean.
“Just two types of marine cyanobacteria are adding up to 500 times more hydrocarbons to the ocean per year than the sum of all other types of petroleum inputs to the ocean, including natural oil seeps, oil spills, fuel dumping and run-off from land,” said Earth scientist Connor Love from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
But unlike more familiar human contributions of hydrocarbons into our ocean, this isn’t a one-way, local dump.
These hydrocarbons, primarily in the form of pentadecane (nC15), are spread across 40 percent of Earth’s surface, and other microbes feast on them. They’re constantly being cycled in such a way that Love and colleagues estimate only around 2 million metric tonnes are present in the water at any one time.
“Every two days you produce and consume all the pentadecane in the ocean,” Love explained.
(Luke Thompson, Chisholm Lab/Nikki Watson, MIT)
Above: A species of the globally distributed marine cyanobacteria, Prochlorococcus.
Today, humanity’s hydrocarbon footprints can be found in most aspects of our surroundings. We emit these molecules composed of only carbon and hydrogen atoms in many ways – the bulk through extraction and use of fossil fuels, but also from plastics, cooking, candles, painting, and the list goes on.
So it probably shouldn’t be a huge surprise that traces of our own emissions drowned out our ability to see the immense hydrocarbon cycle that naturally occurs in our oceans.
It took Love and colleagues some effort to clearly identify this global cycle for the first time.
Far from most human sources of hydrocarbons, in the nutrient-poor North Atlantic subtropical waters, the team had to position the ship they sampled from to face the wind, so the diesel fuel that also contains pentadecane did not contaminate the seven study sites. No one was permitted to cook, smoke or paint on deck during collections.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a ship for an extended period of time, but you paint every day,” explained Earth scientist David Valentine from UCSB. “It’s like the Golden Gate Bridge: You start at one end and by the time you get to the other end it’s time to start over.”
Back on land, the researchers were able to confirm the pentadecane in their seawater samples were of biological origin, by using a gas chromatograph.
Analysing their data, they found concentrations of pentadecane increased with greater abundance of cyanobacteria cells, and the hydrocarbon’s geographic and vertical distribution were consistent with these microbe’s ecology.
Cyanobacteria Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus are responsible for around a quarter of the global ocean’s conversion of sunlight energy into organic matter (primary production) and previous laboratory cultivation revealed they produce pentadecane in the process.
Valentine explains the cyanobacteria likely use pentadecane as a stronger component for highly curved cellular membranes, like those found in chloroplasts (the organelle that photosynthesise).
The cycle of pentadecane in the ocean also follows the diel cycling of these cyanobacteria – their vertical migration in the water in response to changes of light intensity throughout a day.
Together, these findings suggest the cyanobacteria are indeed the source of the biological pentadecane, which is then consumed by other microorganisms that produce the carbon dioxide the cyanobacteria then use to continue the cycle.
Love’s team identified dozens of bacteria and surface-dwelling archaea that bloomed in response to the addition of pentadecane in their samples.
So they then tested to see if the hydrocarbon-consuming microbes could also break down petroleum. The researchers added a petroleum hydrocarbon to samples increasingly closer to areas with active oil seepage, in the Gulf of Mexico.
Unfortunately, only the sea samples from areas already exposed to non-biological hydrocarbons contained microbes that bloomed in response to consuming these molecules.
DNA tests showed genes thought to encode proteins that can degrade these hydrocarbons differed between the microbes, with a contrast evident between those that ate biological hydrocarbons and those that devoured the petroleum-sourced ones.
“We demonstrated that there is a massive and rapid hydrocarbon cycle that occurs in the ocean, and that it is distinct from the ocean’s capacity to respond to petroleum input,” said Valentine.
The researchers have begun sequencing the genomes of the microbes in their sample to further understand the ecology and physiology of the creatures involved in Earth’s natural hydrocarbon cycle.
“I think [these findings reveal] just how much we don’t know about the ecology of a lot of hydrocarbon-consuming organisms,” said Love.
This research was published in Nature Microbiology.
A pair of high schoolers are being commended for making a major astronomical discovery after they identified four new planets in orbit around a star approximately 200 light years away from Earth.
What are the details?
The two students, 16-year-old Kartik Pinglé and 18-year-old Jasmine Wright, both of whom attend schools in Massachusetts, were elated at taking part in the discovery and wrote about it in a peer-reviewed paper published by the Astronomical Journal last week.
The finding may make them the youngest astronomers yet to make such a major discovery, according to a press release about the news published by the Center for Astrophysics, a collaboration between Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution.
The students made their discovery as part of the CFA’s “Student Research Mentoring Program,” an initiative that pairs students interested in research with real-world scientists who then together embark on a year-long project.
As part of the program, the high schoolers were selected to work alongside Tansu Daylan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analyzing data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a satellite that orbits the Earth and surveys nearby bright stars hoping to discover new planets.
The team focused on a nearby Sun-like star referred to as TESS Object of Interest 1233 to perceive whether or not planets were in orbit around it.
“We were looking to see changes in light over time,” Pinglé explained regarding the research. “The idea being that if the planet transits the star, or passes in front of it, it would [periodically] cover up the star and decrease its brightness.”
While probing the star, the students had hoped to discover at least one planet, but to their surprise, they ended up finding four.
“I was very excited and very shocked,” Wright said of the discovery. “We knew this was the goal of Daylan’s research, but to actually find a multiplanetary system, and be part of the discovering team, was really cool.”
According to the research paper, the three outer planets are considered “sub-Neptunes,” or gaseous planets that are smaller than but otherwise similar to our solar system’s planet of the same name, while the innermost planet is considered a “super-Earth” due its large size and rockiness.
What else?
The program’s director, Clara Sousa-Silva, noted that Pinglé and Wright’s achievement is rare.
“Although [it] is one of the goals of the SRMP, it is highly unusual for high-schoolers to be co-authors on journal papers,” she said in the press release.
Daylan added that it was a “win-win” to work alongside Pinglé and Wright and make a major discovery
“As a researcher, I really enjoy interacting with young brains that are open to experimentation and learning and have minimal bias,” he said. “I also think it is very beneficial to high school students, since they get exposure to cutting-edge research and this prepares them quickly for a research career.”
According to the press release, Pinglé, who is still just a junior in high school, is considering studying applied mathematics or astrophysics after graduating, while Wright has been accepted into a five-year master of astrophysics program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Researchers retrieve water samples from the Sargasso Sea. Credit: David Valentine
Hydrocarbons and petroleum are almost synonymous in environmental science. After all, oil reserves account for nearly all the hydrocarbons we encounter. But the few hydrocarbons that trace their origin to biological sources may play a larger ecological role than scientists originally suspected.
A team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution investigated this previously neglected area of oceanography for signs of an overlooked global cycle. They also tested how its existence might impact the ocean’s response to oil spills.
“We demonstrated that there is a massive and rapid hydrocarbon cycle that occurs in the ocean, and that it is distinct from the ocean’s capacity to respond to petroleum input,” said Professor David Valentine, who holds the Norris Presidential Chair in the Department of Earth Science at UCSB. The research, led by his graduate students Eleanor Arrington and Connor Love, appears in Nature Microbiology.
In 2015, an international team led by scientists at the University of Cambridge published a study demonstrating that the hydrocarbon pentadecane was produced by marine cyanobacteria in laboratory cultures. The researchers extrapolated that this compound might be important in the ocean. The molecule appears to relieve stress in curved membranes, so it’s found in things like chloroplasts, wherein tightly packed membranes require extreme curvature, Valentine explained. Certain cyanobacteria still synthesize the compound, while other ocean microbes readily consume it for energy.
Valentine authored a two-page commentary on the paper, along with Chris Reddy from Woods Hole, and decided to pursue the topic further with Arrington and Love. They visited the Gulf of Mexico in 2015, then the west Atlantic in 2017, to collect samples and run experiments.
The team sampled seawater from a nutrient-poor region of the Atlantic known as the Sargasso Sea, named for the floating sargassum seaweed swept in from the Gulf of Mexico. This is beautiful, clear, blue water with Bermuda smack in the middle, Valentine said.
Obtaining the samples was apparently a rather tricky endeavor. Because pentadecane is a common hydrocarbon in diesel fuel, the team had to take extra precautions to avoid contamination from the ship itself. They had the captain turn the ship into the wind so the exhaust wouldn’t taint the samples and they analyzed the chemical signature of the diesel to ensure it wasn’t the source of any pentadecane they found.
Extensive quantities of pentadecane are produced and consumed in the upper layers of the ocean. Credit: David Valentine
What’s more, no one could smoke, cook or paint on deck while the researchers were collecting seawater. “That was a big deal,” Valentine said, “I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a ship for an extended period of time, but you paint every day. It’s like the Golden Gate Bridge: You start at one end and by the time you get to the other end it’s time to start over.”
The precautions worked, and the team recovered pristine seawater samples. “Standing in front of the gas chromatograph in Woods Hole after the 2017 expedition, it was clear the samples were clean with no sign of diesel,” said co-lead author Love. “Pentadecane was unmistakable and was already showing clear oceanographic patterns even in the first couple of samples that [we] ran.”
Due to their vast numbers in the world’s ocean, Love continued, “just two types of marine cyanobacteria are adding up to 500 times more hydrocarbons to the ocean per year than the sum of all other types of petroleum inputs to the ocean, including natural oil seeps, oil spills, fuel dumping and run-off from land.” These microbes collectively produce 300-600 million metric tons of pentadecane per year, an amount that dwarfs the 1.3 million metric tons of hydrocarbons released from all other sources.
While these quantities are impressive, they’re a bit misleading. The authors point out that the pentadecane cycle spans 40% or more of the Earth’s surface, and more than one trillion quadrillion pentadecane-laden cyanobacterial cells are suspended in the sunlit region of the world’s ocean. However, the life cycle of those cells is typically less than two days. As a result, the researchers estimate that the ocean contains only around 2 million metric tons of pentadecane at any given time.
It’s a fast spinning wheel, Valentine explained, so the actual amount present at any point in time is not particularly large. “Every two days you produce and consume all the pentadecane in the ocean,” he said.
In the future, the researchers hope to link microbes’ genomics to their physiology and ecology. The team already has genome sequences for dozens of organisms that multiplied to consume the pentadecane in their samples. “The amount of information that’s there is incredible,” said Valentine, “and I think reveals just how much we don’t know about the ecology of a lot of hydrocarbon-consuming organisms.”
Having confirmed the existence and magnitude of this biohydrocarbon cycle, the team sought to tackle the question of whether its presence might prime the ocean to break down spilled petroleum. The key question, Arrington explained, is whether these abundant pentadecane-consuming microorganisms serve as an asset during oil spill cleanups. To investigate this, they added pentane—a petroleum hydrocarbon similar to pentadecane—to seawater sampled at various distances from natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico.
The amount of pentadecane cycling through the oceans dwarfs the input of hydrocarbons from oil. However, the microbes involved in the pentadecane cycle are unlikely to be able to handle the chemical complexity of hydrocarbons from oil. Credit: David Valentine
They measured the overall respiration in each sample to see how long it took pentane-eating microbes to multiply. The researchers hypothesized that, if the pentadecane cycle truly primed microbes to consume other hydrocarbons as well, then all the samples should develop blooms at similar rates.
But this was not the case. Samples from near the oil seeps quickly developed blooms. “Within about a week of adding pentane, we saw an abundant population develop,” Valentine said. “And that gets slower and slower the further away you get, until, when you’re out in the North Atlantic, you can wait months and never see a bloom.” In fact, Arrington had to stay behind after the expedition at the facility in Woods Hole, Massachusetts to continue the experiment on the samples from the Atlantic because those blooms took so long to appear.
Interestingly, the team also found evidence that microbes belonging to another domain of life, Archaea, may also play a role in the pentadecane cycle. “We learned that a group of mysterious, globally abundant microbes—which have yet to be domesticated in the laboratory—may be fueled by pentadecane in the surface ocean,” said co-lead author Arrington.
The results beg the question why the presence of an enormous pentadecane cycle appeared to have no effect on the breakdown of the petrochemical pentane. “Oil is different from pentadecane,” Valentine said, “and you need to understand what the differences are, and what compounds actually make up oil, to understand how the ocean’s microbes are going to respond to it.”
Ultimately, the genes commonly used by microbes to consume the pentane are different than those used for pentadecane. “A microbe living in the clear waters offshore Bermuda is much less likely to encounter the petrochemical pentane compared to pentadecane produced by cyanobacteria, and therefore is less likely to carry the genes for pentane consumption,” said Arrington.
Loads of different microbial species can consume pentadecane, but this doesn’t imply that they can also consume other hydrocarbons, Valentine continued, especially given the diversity of hydrocarbon structures that exist in petroleum. There are less than a dozen common hydrocarbons that marine organisms produce, including pentadecane and methane. Meanwhile, petroleum comprises tens of thousands of different hydrocarbons. What’s more, we are now seeing that organisms able to break down complex petroleum products tend to live in greater abundance near natural oil seeps.
Valentine calls this phenomenon “biogeographic priming”—when the ocean’s microbial population is conditioned to a particular energy source in a specific geographic area. “And what we see with this work is a distinction between pentadecane and petroleum,” he said, “that is important for understanding how different ocean regions will respond to oil spills.”
Nutrient-poor gyres like the Sargasso Sea account for an impressive 40% of the Earth’s surface. But, ignoring the land, that still leaves 30% of the planet to explore for other biohydrocarbon cycles. Valentine thinks the processes in regions of higher productivity will be more complex, and perhaps will provide more priming for oil consumption. He also pointed out that nature’s blueprint for biological hydrocarbon production holds promise for efforts to develop the next generation of green energy.
Window to another world: Life is bubbling up to seafloor with petroleum from deep below
More information:
Connor R. Love et al. Microbial production and consumption of hydrocarbons in the global ocean, Nature Microbiology (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41564-020-00859-8
Provided by
University of California – Santa Barbara
Citation:
Researchers discover an immense hydrocarbon cycle in the world’s ocean (2021, February 2)
retrieved 2 February 2021
from https://phys.org/news/2021-02-immense-hydrocarbon-world-ocean.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Chrome 88 was released only last week, marking the release of the Manifest V3 extension API, changes to password management, and the official death of Adobe Flash support. Chrome 89 has now arrived in the Beta Channel, and it seems to be an even bigger release — even if many of its changes are hidden to most people. Let’s dive in!
Privacy Sandbox
Google first announced Privacy Sandbox all the way back in 2019, as the company’s planned replacement for third-party browser cookies. It’s still very much a work in progress, but Google aims for it to be “a secure environment for personalization that also protects user privacy.” Chrome 89 has the first pieces of the personalization interface, currently hidden behind a new flag: #privacy-sandbox-settings.
With the flag enabled, a new page for Privacy Sandbox can be found in Settings > Privacy and security > Privacy sandbox. There’s currently a single toggle, which enables ‘Web crowd and ad measurement.’ Google explained how this works in a recent blog post:
Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) [Privacy Sandbox] proposes a new way for businesses to reach people with relevant content and ads by clustering large groups of people with similar interests. This approach effectively hides individuals “in the crowd” and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser.
By creating simulations based on the principles defined in Chrome’s FLoC proposal, Google’s ads teams have tested this privacy-first alternative to third-party cookies. Results indicate that when it comes to generating interest-based audiences, FLoC can provide an effective replacement signal for third-party cookies.
Google isn’t allowing sites to use Privacy Sandbox yet, but now we know where you’ll be able to manage its settings once the feature is finished.
Discover feed
Chrome 89 has a few changes to the Discover feed on the New Tab Page. Currently, articles in the Discover section are listed in cards, but in Chrome 89 they are only separated by dividers. The title font also seems to be slightly bigger, and perhaps most importantly, the description preview has been removed.
Chrome 88 (left) vs. Chrome 89 (right)
It’s interesting to see Google experiment with removing the teaser text. In most cases, they’re too short to provide any helpful context or added information, and removing them potentially allows more articles to appear on-screen at once.
Google is testing a new interface for the site info popup on Android, which appears when you press the ‘I’ or lock icon in the address bar. The popup normally shows the full address, information about page security, and a list of granted permissions. Chrome 89 includes a new flag (#page-info-discoverability) that updates the popup’s design.
Left: Old UI; Center, Right: New UI
The new popup fits in better with Google’s updated design language, and you can revoke permissions without opening Chrome’s normal settings panel.
Web NFC API
Google first began testing NFC in web apps with the release of Chrome 81. That version added initial support for the Web NFC API, allowing sites to read and write NFC tags. It’s mainly intended for inventory management, conferences, museum exhibits, and anywhere else NFC is frequently used. Starting with Chrome 89, the Web NFC API is enabled by default on Android.
Web NFC demo from Chrome Dev Summit 2019
The Web NFC API is limited to reading and writing NDEF data, so low-level operations like ISO-DEP, NFC-A/B, NFC-F are not supported. Peer-to-peer communication mode and Host-based Card Emulation (HCE) also won’t work. Unfortunately, that probably rules out any chances of someone creating an Amiibo creator web app.
Like with microphones, cameras, and other hardware features, NFC requires granting a permission from a popup. It will be interesting to see how the API will be used in the coming years.
Web Sharing on desktop
Chrome on Android has supported the Web Share and Web Share Target APIs for a while now, which allows web apps to send and receive data with Android’s native share menu. The features have gone a long way to blur the lines between native and web apps on Android, but annoyingly, they haven’t been available on desktop platforms (except with Safari on macOS)… until now.
Web sharing on Chrome OS 89
With the release of Chrome 89, web sharing (where web apps can open the system share dialog) is now available on Windows and Chrome OS, and web apps can function as a target on Chrome OS. Developers won’t have to add any extra code for the functionality to work on desktop platforms.
Other changes
As always, this update includes changes for both users and developers. Here are some smaller changes included in Chrome 89:
Chrome added support for text fragment links in 2019, which are links that automatically scroll to a certain string of text. Google Search started using them in 2020, and now websites can change how the highlighted portions look like with the new CSS ::target-text pseudo-element.
Chrome 89 can load AVIF content natively using AV1 decoders on Android and WebView.
The CSS property ‘list-style-type’ supports two new keywords: ‘disclosure-open’ and ‘disclosure-closed’.
The default value of CSS ‘display’ property for
Chrome now supports the CSS property ‘overflow:clip,’ which allows web pages to turn off any type of scrolling for a box. It uses less RAM than ‘overflow: hidden,’ which is often used for the same purpose.
Google has added a new cross-origin reporting API for sites to track usage across different web domains.
Sites can now detect if the current device is set to high contrast display mode, using the new forced-colors CSS media query (similar to how detection for dark mode works).
Some legacy prefixed events (webkitprerenderstart, webkitprerenderstop, webkitprerenderload, and webkitprerenderdomcontentloaded) have been removed.
Chrome now supports the ‘await’ keyword at the top level in JavaScript modules.
The chrome://media-internals page will be removed in Chrome 91, and Chrome 89 includes a new flag (#enable-media-internals) that toggles access to the page.
The new flag #enable-table-ng is available in Chrome 89, which enables the new Blink table layout engine, TableNG.
There’s a new flag for enabling “a rich bottom sheet” for installing Progressive Web Apps on Android, #mobile-pwa-install-use-bottom-sheet, but it doesn’t appear to do anything yet.
When you enter a website in the Chrome address bar, it currently adds “http://” to the front by default. Chrome 89 has a new flag (#omnibox-default-typed-navigations-to-https) that changes this behavior, and if the website doesn’t appear to support HTTPS, Chrome will fall back to the HTTP URL.
Chrome 89 has initial support for XFA forms in the PDF reader.
A new flag, #read-later-reminder-notification, adds a popup when an article in your reading list has been unread for a week.
The Web Serial API, which allows web apps to communicate with hardware over serial connections, is now enabled by default on Windows and Chrome OS. It was previously only enabled by default on Android.
The WebHID API allows sites to more easily use gamepads and other interface devices, and it’s enabled by default with Chrome 89.
Download
The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.
Scientists have gotten a look at what it is that causes a strange electrical phenomenon called blue jet lightning. Instruments on the International Space Station did what had been impossible for scientists on land. Per Science News’s breakdown, blue jets — which fire upward from lightning clouds into the stratosphere, rather than down to the ground — have been observed by scientists and pilots for years, but without having a topside view of the lightning clouds, finding the cause or source was difficult. Since most pilots will tell you that flying through an active thunder cloud is not ideal unless it’s absolutely necessary, that limits observation options.
The blue jet gets its name from its color, and gets its color from what it burns off in the atmosphere. Traditional lightning is interacting with a wide variety of gases on its way to the ground, but the upward movement of the blue jets means that the electric bolt is burning mostly nitrogen, which burns blue at that temperature.
According to Science News, blue jets can reach altitudes of about 31 miles (50 kilometers) in less than a second.
Scientists have finally gotten a clear view of the spark that sets off an exotic type of lightning called a blue jet.
The Space Station last week spotted a blue jet emerging from an extremely brief, bright burst of electricity that happened near the top of a thunder cloud. Scientists reported the find on January 20.
While blue jets and other upper-atmosphere weather events are unlikely to cause serous inuries to people or animals, scientists monitor and study them not just for the academic understanding of the natural world, but for more practical reasons as well; such events can impact how radio waves travel, impacting satellites and other communications technology.
Scientists are trying to figure out what might be special about the sparks that generate the blue jets. The blast reported in January — and recorded in February 2019 — was a 10-microsecond flash of bright blue light, which took place near the top of the cloud, about 10 miles up.
Torsten Neubert, an atmospheric physicist at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby quoted in the Science News piece, suspects that the spark may have been a unique kind of short-range electric discharge inside of the cloud. That would account for the brief, intense blast, because while traditional lightning is caused by discharges between oppositely charged objects many kilometers apart, these short term sparks might bring the oppositely-charged areas within about a kilometer, creating powerful bursts of current that would burn up fast. Evidence of such bursts are nothing new, but this could provide new insight into the phenomenon.
Artist illustration of WASP-62b, the first Jupiter-like planet detected without clouds or haze in its observable atmosphere. The illustration is drawn from the perspective of an observer nearby to the planet. Credit: M. Weiss/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have detected the first Jupiter-like planet without clouds or haze in its observable atmosphere. The findings were published this month in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Named WASP-62b, the gas giant was first detected in 2012 through the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) South survey. Its atmosphere, however, had never been closely studied until now.
“For my thesis, I have been working on exoplanet characterization,” says Munazza Alam, a graduate student at the Center for Astrophysics who led the study. “I take discovered planets and I follow up on them to characterize their atmospheres.”
Known as a “hot Jupiter,” WASP-62b is 575 light years away and about half the mass of our solar system’s Jupiter. However, unlike our Jupiter, which takes nearly 12 years to orbit the sun, WASP-62b completes a rotation around its star in just four-and-a-half days. This proximity to the star makes it extremely hot, hence the name “hot Jupiter.”
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, Alam recorded data and observations of the planet using spectroscopy, the study of electromagnetic radiation to help detect chemical elements. Alam specifically monitored WASP-62b as it swept in front of its host star three times, making visible light observations, which can detect the presence of sodium and potassium in a planet’s atmosphere.
“I’ll admit that at first I wasn’t too excited about this planet,” Alam says. “But once I started to take a look at the data, I got excited.”
While there was no evidence of potassium, sodium’s presence was strikingly clear. The team was able to view the full sodium absorption lines in their data, or its complete fingerprint. Clouds or haze in the atmosphere would obscure the complete signature of sodium, Alam explains, and astronomers usually can only make out small hints of its presence.
“This is smoking gun evidence that we are seeing a clear atmosphere,” she says.
Cloud-free planets are exceedingly rare; astronomers estimate that less than 7 percent of exoplanets have clear atmospheres, according to recent research. For example, the first and only other known exoplanet with a clear atmosphere was discovered in 2018. Named WASP-96b, it is classified as a hot Saturn.
Astronomers believe studying exoplanets with cloudless atmospheres can lead to a better understanding of how they were formed. Their rarity “suggests something else is going on or they formed in a different way than most planets,” Alam says. Clear atmospheres also make it easier to study the chemical composition of planets, which can help identify what a planet is made of.
With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope later this year, the team hopes to have new opportunities to study and better understand WASP-62b. The telescope’s improved technologies, like higher resolution and better precision, should help them probe the atmosphere even closer to search for the presence of more elements, such as silicon.
Astronomers see unexpected molecule in exoplanet atmosphere
More information:
Munazza K. Alam et al, Evidence of a Clear Atmosphere for WASP-62b: The Only Known Transiting Gas Giant in the JWST Continuous Viewing Zone, The Astrophysical Journal (2021). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/abd18e
Provided by
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Citation:
Astronomers discover first cloudless, Jupiter-like planet (2021, January 22)
retrieved 22 January 2021
from https://phys.org/news/2021-01-astronomers-cloudless-jupiter-like-planet.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
