Hubble has helped astronomers measure weather changes on an exoplanet, and it's clear it won't be at the top of anyone's travel list. Forecasts for the planet Tyros (WASP-121b) call for a massive hurricane today with maximum temperatures over 3000°F (1650°C), followed by a high likelihood of molten iron showers tonight.
Astronomers spend a lot of time searching for potentially habitable exoplanets. What we are looking for is a rocky world with stable climate, suitable temperature, sufficient water supply, and shelter from radiation. Of course, it cannot be in a place where asteroids are flying around. While we probably won't be visiting these planets in person any time soon, they offer us our best chance of discovering alien life in their technology or in their farts.
Obviously, Telos does not meet these conditions. Officially known as WASP-121b, it is a hot, Jupiter-sized planet orbiting so close to its star that its gravity threatens to tear it apart. At such close range, a year lasts only 31 hours, and of course you can't brush across the surface of a cosmic nuclear reactor without feeling a little hot - days on Tyros are hot enough to evaporate iron.
Scientists have taken snapshots of exoplanet weather systems in the past, but in a new study, a team simulated how Tyros' weather would change over time. The researchers collected Hubble observations of the planet captured in 2016, 2018 and 2019, then reprocessed and compared them to see how it had changed over the years. Next, they ran sophisticated computer models of the atmosphere to examine which scenario best explained everything they saw.
The results are quite astonishing. Tyros is tidally locked, meaning that the same side of it always faces its host star, resulting in absolutely hot, uninterrupted daylight on one side and cold, eternal night on the other. This temperature difference, of course, causes crazy turbulence in the atmosphere, with hurricanes raging continuously, sweeping across half of the world at once, and then being torn into pieces again.
If you thought hurricanes were bad enough on Earth, on Tyros the temperatures of these storms can soar to nearly 3,410 degrees Fahrenheit (1,877 degrees Celsius). There are actually cooler stars than this. In this case, the clouds are not made of water vapor, but of iron, which falls from the night sky at night.
As a gas giant, Tyros has no surface to stand on, so habitability for life is non-existent before we even see the hellish hurricanes. Still, the team says the work can help us better characterize the weather characteristics of exoplanets and may aid in the future search for more habitable planets.
Quentin Changeat, the team's principal investigator, said: "The data set collected represents a large number of observations of a single planet and is currently the only consistent set of such repeated observations. The information we extracted from these observations was used to infer the chemistry, temperature and cloud cover of WASP-121b's atmosphere at different times. This gives us a beautiful picture of the planet's changes over time."
The research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. Tyros' weather model can be seen in the video below.