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Atmospheric precipitation on World can exist a mild inconvenience, but information technology'south part of the ecosystem that makes our planet habitable. Some much less pleasant substances fall from the heaven on other planets and moons. For example, information technology rains sulfuric acid on Venus and liquid methane on Titan. NASA has merely detected a planet with an entirely new type of weather condition. On Kepler-13Ab, information technology snows metal.

NASA fabricated this discovery with the aging Hubble Space Telescope–it's more than than a quarter-century onetime, but it's still the virtually capable telescope we take. Kepler-13Ab is a jumbo exoplanet with a mass of about six Jupiters located i,730 light years abroad. It's likewise a fellow member of a common course of gas giants known as a "hot Jupiter." That ways information technology orbits very shut to its host star.

Kepler-13Ab might be big, but even Hubble can't prototype an exoplanet straight. It can, however, gather a lot of data about a planet's atmosphere under sure circumstances. In the case of Kepler-13Ab, its orbit passes in front of and backside its host star from our perspective (that's how the planet was originally discovered past the Kepler probe). The team was able to perform spectroscopic analysis in well-nigh-infrared as the planet passed behind the star, which is known equally a secondary eclipse.

Hubble revealed several details virtually Kepler-13Ab's limerick during this observation. First, Kepler-13Ab is tidally locked to its host star–it'due south e'er day on one side and always nighttime on the other. This isn't unusual in the universe. For example, Earth rotates, but the moon is tidally locked to World. The temperature of Kepler-13Ab'south atmosphere also gets colder at increasing altitude, which is the contrary of what should happen on a hot Jupiter. NASA says this unusual property is a consequence of how titanium oxide circulates in the clouds of Kepler-13Ab.

Usually, titanium oxide (which is the active ingredient in sunscreen) in the clouds of a hot Jupiter absorbs heat and radiates it out into space. That makes the upper atmosphere warmer. The titanium oxide precipitates out of the clouds as solid "snow" on the dark side of the planet. Astronomers believe this process happens in all hot Jupiters, only a combination of being tidally locked and extremely massive prevents the titanium oxide on Kepler-13Ab from mixing back into the dayside temper. Thus, the heat-radiating titanium oxide is continuously removed from planet'south temper, leading to a and so-called "cold trap."

NASA expects to have fifty-fifty better tools to report exoplanets when the Webb Infinite Telescope is online in several years. Data gathered from planets like Kepler-13Ab are instrumental in refining the techniques we will i 24-hour interval utilize on smaller Earth-like planets.

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