American astronomers from the University of Colorado in Boulder have obtained accurate information about atmospheric processes on planets in the “hot Jupiter” class for the first time, thanks to the small CUTE spacecraft launched in 2021. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Astronomical Journal (TAJ).
The CUTE mission, which stands for Colorado Ultraviolet Transition Experiment, was designed to study the most hostile planets known to humanity.
The CUTE probe is a compact device approximately 35 centimeters long. It is equipped with an ultraviolet (UV) telescope. It observes distant planets as they pass in front of their stars, causing the UV radiation from these stars to decrease. In some cases, the spacecraft is so sensitive that it can detect a diminution of starlight by only 1%.
Hot Jupiters are gas giants similar to Jupiter in our solar system, but they may be hotter than the Sun.
For example, the CUTE spacecraft managed to study the planet WASP-189b, located 300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra. The temperature of the celestial body was over 8300 °C, which is about 2800 °C hotter than our star. CUTE observations also showed that gas is escaping from the depths of WASP-189b at a rate of approximately 400 thousand tons per second.
The CUTE team has already observed seven hot Jupiters, and more planets of this class will be discovered in the near future. Scientists hope the observations will help them understand why some planets lose their atmospheres while others remain virtually unchanged. This information could also be useful within the solar system. In particular, astronomers believe that Mars once had a dense atmosphere, but over billions of years the influence of the Sun destroyed it.
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