An exoplanet with a daytime temperature hot enough to vaporize iron has methane on its nightside because of an atmospheric circulation that should not be able to exist at that heat

An exoplanet with a daytime temperature hot enough to vaporize iron has methane on its nightside because of an atmospheric circulation that should not be able to exist at that heat

A team led by Thomas Evans-Soma of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg has published observations of the exoplanet WASP-121b that complicate the existing picture of how chemistry moves through an ultra-hot atmosphere. Using the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph to watch the planet through a complete orbit of its host star, the team detected methane in abundance on the planet’s nightside. On the dayside, tem…