![]() And this has hampered understanding of the mechanisms governing the formation of these planets.Īs it is so close to its star, WASP-76 b has a temperature well above 2000☌. In the giant planets in our Solar System, however, that's true for only a handful of elements, whose compositions remain poorly constrained. Within the Sun, the abundances of almost all elements in the periodic table are known with great accuracy. "We recognized that the powerful new MAROON-X spectrograph would enable us to study the chemical composition of WASP-76 b with a level of detail unprecedented for any giant planet," says UdeM astronomy professor Björn Benneke, co-author of the study and Stefan Pelletier's PhD research supervisor. Notably, in a study also published in Nature in March 2020, a team found an iron signature and hypothesised that there could be iron rain on the planet.Īware of these studies, Pelletier became motivated to obtain new, independent observations of WASP-76 b using the MAROON-X high-resolution optical spectrograph on the Gemini-North 8-metre Telescope in Hawai'i, part of the International Gemini Observatory, operated by NSF's NOIRLab. ![]() Since its discovery by the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) program in 2013, many teams have studied it and identified various elements in its atmosphere. With a mass similar to that of Jupiter, but almost six times bigger by volume, it is quite "puffy." It reaches extreme temperatures because it is very close to its parent star, a massive star 634 light-years away in the constellation of Pisces: approximately 12 times closer than Mercury is to the Sun. "Truly rare are the times when an exoplanet hundreds of light years away can teach us something that would otherwise likely be impossible to know about our own Solar System," said Pelletier. The team's study is published in the journal Nature. ![]() Those include rock-forming elements whose abundances are not even known for giant planets in the Solar System such as Jupiter or Saturn. Using the MAROON-X instrument on the Gemini-North Telescope, the team was able to identify and measure the abundance of 11 chemical elements in the atmosphere of the planet.
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