The international team of astrophysicists discovered the clouds on the exoplanet of WASP-127B and managed to set the height on which they are located. Scientists told about their observations on the European Congress on the Sciences of Planets.
Located in 525 light years from the solar system, hot Saturn turns around the yellow dwarf in four days. Because of this, the temperature on it can reach 1100 degrees Celsius. Caused by this looseness – with the diameter similar to the saturn mass, is 1.3 Jupiter – makes it an ideal candidate for studying the atmosphere. With the help of observations on the Hubble telescope and visible light measurements by the Espresso spectrograph of the VLT telescope in Chile, researchers managed to explore the various regions during the passage of hot Saturn in front of the stars disk.
Astronomers also managed to determine the presence of sodium and water vapor there, but on a much lower height than expected. Strong signals from water vapor in the infrared range showed that it is closed by clouds, which are opaque in the visible range. By combining data from Hubble and Espresso, researchers managed to clarify the height of the clouds layer, where the pressure is from 0.3 to 0.5 millibers. The composition of the clouds to scientists could not yet succeed.