Watching an exoplanet living 124 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Cygnus, an international team of astronomers recorded huge amounts of helium in the exoplanet WASP-107b atmosphere, which rapidly disappears under the influence of aggressive radiation from a nearby star and creates a giant gas cloud.
This is a really exciting discovery, especially considering that for the first time helium was found in the atmosphere of an exoplanet only this year. It will help us to find out which types of planets have large hydrogen and helium shells and how long they can hold these gases in their atmosphere.
-Jessica Speake, co-author of the study from the University of Exeter (United Kingdom)
Helium is the second most abundant element in the Universe and one of the main components of Saturn and Jupiter, but for a long time it could not be found in the atmospheres of distant worlds due to a very peculiar signature located in the infrared region and lying outside the range of most of the tools used earlier. For the first time, it was able to be fixed in the beginning of 2018 in the shell of the incredibly bloated exoplanet WASP-107b due to the observations of the Hubble space telescope.
Now a ground-based instrument came to the aid of the space observatory – the CARMENES spectrograph mounted on a 4-meter telescope in Kalar-Alto (Spain). With its help, astronomers could not only fix helium in the atmosphere comparable in size to Neptune and the exoplanet HAT-P-11b 4-5 times the Earth’s mass, but also calculate the speed of its escape under the influence of the radiation of the parent star.
Helium is blown from the day side to the night side at a speed of more than 10,000 kilometers per hour. And, since it is a very light gas, it overcomes the attraction of HAT-P-11b and forms a cloud around the plumes. We had previously suspected that such proximity with a star, 5% of the distance from Earth to the Sun, could affect the atmosphere of this exoplanet, and now new accurate observations have confirmed our assumption.
-Romain Allart, lead author of a study from the University of Geneva (Switzerland)
Astronomers believe that this first-of-its-kind research will help to reveal new details of extreme conditions in the atmospheres of the hottest exoplanets, and also opens a new window for studying them using ground-based tools, which previously was considered impossible.
The time has come for exciting research on the composition of exoplanetary atmospheres.
-Christoph Lovis, co-author of the study from the University of Geneva
A giant helium cloud has been discovered around the exoplanet WASP-107b
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