The ‘cotton candy planet’ where it rains sand

Thanks to increasingly advanced technology, science can make new discoveries in all possible fields, including astronomy. A lot is happening in astroscience at the moment. Distant galaxies, planets and stars are constantly being discovered and explored.

Researchers recently used the James Webb Telescope to take a closer look at an exoplanet located over 200 light-years away from Earth. They described their spectacular observations in the journal Nature. An exoplanet (also exoplanet) is a planet that orbits a star other than our sun.

The exoplanet called “WASP-107b” has a unique property: it is “fluffy”. The gas giant has a very low density for its size. It is similar in size to Jupiter, but has only about one-tenth its mass. As a result, ‘WASP-107b’ has literally blown up and looks almost like cotton candy – which is why it is sometimes called the ‘cotton candy planet’.

Astronomers from the Université Paris Cité have now examined the exoplanet’s shell in more detail. They discovered that it consists of water vapor, sulfur dioxide and silicate clouds – that is, sand. The composition is unusual in many respects.

For example, the high concentration of sulfur dioxide does not occur on other gas planets of this size. Furthermore, there is no methane in the shell of “WASP-107b” – although common models predict that such planets should have plenty of methane. “Given the predicted dominance of methane, this raises questions,” says Nature.

Another interesting discovery is the dense clouds of silica, or sand. The researchers suspect that strong currents carry vaporized silica continuously upwards from the hot, deep layers of the planet, where it then condenses into clouds: “This is comparable to the water vapor and cloud cycle on Earth, but with sand droplets.” So it’s raining sand on “WASP-107b”.