NASA Hubble Space Telescope Reveals A Distant Planet May Be On Its Second Atmosphere – Mashable India

NASA revealed recently that scientists have found evidence with the help of NASA Hubble Space telescope that a planet orbiting a distant star may have lost its atmosphere and gained a second one through volcanic activity.

"It's super exciting because we believe the atmosphere that we see now was regenerated, so it could be a secondary atmosphere," said study co-author Raissa Estrela of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

"We first thought that these highly irradiated planets could be pretty boring because we believed that they lost their atmospheres. But we looked at existing observations of this planet with Hubble and said, 'Oh no, there is an atmosphere there.'"

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NASA states that the planet GJ 1132 b is hypothesized to have begun as a gaseous world with a thick hydrogen blanket of atmosphere. Starting out at several times the diameter of Earth, this so-called "sub-Neptune" is believed to have quickly lost its primordial hydrogen and helium atmosphere because of the intense radiation of the hot, young star it orbits.

Astronomers were really surprised to find that Hubble observed an atmosphere which, according to their theory, is a "secondary atmosphere". Scientists used a combination of direct observational evidence and inference with the help of computer modeling and found out that the atmosphere comprises molecular hydrogen, hydrogen cyanide, methane and also contains an aerosol haze. Moreover, modeling suggests the aerosol haze is based on photochemically produced hydrocarbons thats similar to smog on Earth.

The team of scientists working on this new discovery will publish their findings in an upcoming issue of The Astronomical Journal.

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NASA Hubble Space Telescope Reveals A Distant Planet May Be On Its Second Atmosphere - Mashable India