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Northwestern University-led astronomers have discovered salty skies surrounding the universe’s famous “Pink Planet.”
For more than a decade, the ancient, rosy hazed world kept astronomers guessing. One of the coldest known planetary-mass companions ever directly imaged, the elusive object is too faint for astronomers to dissect its light from Earth. But new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal an atmosphere filled with exotic chemistry — and salty clouds unlike anything seen before.
The observations provide some of the first direct evidence for salt clouds in a cold object’s atmosphere, a phenomenon scientists theorized more than 15 years ago. The discovery also marks an important step toward studying increasingly cold objects, which are too dim to examine with ground-based telescopes.
The study will be published on Thursday (June 18) in the Astronomical Journal.
