The giant “Super Jupiter” in the constellation Swan is the hottest planet ever to be discovered, with temperatures reaching 1,700 degrees Celsius, causing iron and titanium to float in the atmosphere.
A group of scientists from the University of Bern (Switzerland) has just announced the discovery of a surprising planet called KELT-9b.
Observed from the earth, it belongs to the constellation Cygnus Swan. This planet revolves around a central star called KELT-9 with a temperature of up to 4,327 degrees Celsius.
This planet is what astronomy calls “super Jupiter”. KELT-9b is a gas planet with a mass 3 times and 2 times the diameter of Jupiter. Discovered with temperatures up to 1700 degrees Celsius, although only about 1/3 of the sun, but warmer than many other stars. This temperature is almost four times that of Venus – the hottest planet in our solar system with an average temperature of 462 degrees Celsius.
“It has many similarities to a star even though it is purely a planet,” said Kevin Heng, astrophysicist and team member at Space.
This record temperature allowed scientists to detect iron and titanium in the atmosphere of KELT-9b. And because of this temperature, the clouds on this planet cannot condense, allowing iron and titanium atoms to exist in a very special form: individual atoms suspended in the air.
This reinforces the earlier theory that iron and titanium could be very common in the universe. Before KELT-9b, an extrasolar planet named Kepler-13A also had titanium dioxide (each element consisted of a titanium molecule and 2 oxygen atoms).
The aforementioned study was carried out using data collected by the Galileo National Telescope in Spain.
Another group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (Germany) also studied the atmosphere of KELT-9b and found that it contains a lot of hydrogen in the boiling state.
It is the boiling hydrogen that helps push heavy metal atoms upward and float in the atmosphere. Max Planck’s research has also just been published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.
