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Exoplanetary Atmosphere Categorization Begins
A new paper presented a catalog of 25 exoplanets observed using hundreds of hours of observing time on the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes.
Not every world we talk is, of course, in our own solar system. There are over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets out there in our galaxy, and every day, we learn more and more about them. The trend these days is pushing the field of exoplanetary atmosphere categorization in amazing directions, what with advances to ground-based telescopes, new uses of space telescopes, and even, maybe, possibly (I am really tired of waiting) a new space telescope.
And this week, researchers released a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series that presented a catalog of 25 exoplanets observed using hundreds of hours of observing time on both the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. Those 25 worlds are all considered hot Jupiters — those gas giants that orbit very close to their parent stars, heating up to wild temperatures.
Awesomely, the team found common threads among the properties they analyzed, including thermal profiles and chemical abundances. For one characteristic, they look at “thermal inversion”, where an atmosphere that generally traps heat has a temperature that increases as…
