American astronomers from the University of Kansas have discovered what kind of weather conditions usually occur on mini-Neptunes, the most common type of planet in our Milky Way galaxy. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Astrophysics Journal Letters (TAJL).
Mini-Neptunes are predominantly gas planets slightly larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune in the solar system.
Scientists examined 15 such exoplanets using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The analysis performed on Mini Neptunes differed from previous studies; Because instead of fitting the data to a general model of exoplanets, the team developed a special program to determine the general properties of the atmosphere on such worlds.
This approach allowed astronomers to factor in model parameters such as the amount of water vapor and cloud configurations and then run hundreds or thousands of simulations that recreated the possible atmospheric structures of mini-Neptunes.
Computer calculations have shown that many of the most common planets in our galaxy are quite cloudy due to low cloud cover. This is because mini-Neptunes remain in the air for long periods of time due to the low tendency of particles in the cloud cover to settle.
Earlier astronomers to create An almost exact replica of the young solar system 270 light-years from Earth.