A Bizarre Weather Quirk Means This Planet’s Permanent Night Is 300 Degrees Hotter Than Its Permanent Day

It’s pretty damn hot in New York this week, with temperatures reaching into the mid-90s. At the South Pole, though, it’s currently -89 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s incredible that one planet can have such variance in temperature, but consider the case of WASP-39b, a distant exoplanet: It has one side that’s permanently bathed in light and one side that’s perpetually dark—and the dark side is somehow 300 degrees hotter.

The exoplanet is 1.3 times larger than Jupiter and sits 700 light-years away from us. As it circles its star, it doesn’t twirl as Earth does. Instead, one side is always facing starwards. You’d think the perma-daylight side would be boiling, while the perma-night side would be frigid, but it turns out that the opposite is actually true. New data from the Webb Space Telescope shows that as gas is heated on the star-facing side, it forms powerful winds that reach thousands of miles per hour and rush into the dark side, while winds coming the other way push cold gas into the bright side. The result is a permanent evening heated to 1,450 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to instantly melt the skin off your body. The forever morning side has more cloud cover than the evening side, meaning that aside from being a relatively chilly 1,150 degrees, it’s also constantly more overcast than a neighboring region across the barrier that separates the two sides. It’s unclear how much those clouds affects the temperature, but scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute, who published their findings in Nature, hope to figure that out with more analysis.

The researchers were able to gather their information thanks to the Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared spectrograph, which allowed them to compare light that went through the exoplanet’s atmosphere as it moved in front of the star to the light emitted by the star when it was unimpeded.

Previous glimpses at WASP-39b showed the presence of materials like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, water vapor, and sodium in the atmosphere. With this new knowledge about one exoplanet, the STSI is now hoping to turn Webb toward other tidally locked exoplanets to study their atmospheres to see if there are similar oddities in their weather patterns.

ExoplanetsJames Webb Space Telescopewasp 39-b

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Source: Gizmodo

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