{"id":16293,"date":"2025-06-21T08:50:53","date_gmt":"2025-06-21T12:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/?p=16293"},"modified":"2025-06-21T08:50:53","modified_gmt":"2025-06-21T12:50:53","slug":"mineral-dust-clouds-hide-planets-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/mineral-dust-clouds-hide-planets-secret\/16293\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s darker than darkness \u2014 Mineral dust clouds hide a planet\u2019s hottest secret"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Even if you&#8217;re not into astronomy or science, there&#8217;s no denying that everything that involves space, besides being a bit strange, is fascinating. And this only increases with each discovery. That said, astronomers were recently observing space with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and found something unprecedented when observing a young planetary system more than 300 light-years from Earth. However, it wasn&#8217;t this in itself that caught their attention, but rather the <\/span><b>clouds so dense that they hide an incandescent secret<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> inside one of the planets.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>The two-for-one discovery<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The observed system has already been named YSES-1. This planetary system is home to <\/span><b>two gas giants <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">that are still forming. They orbit a star similar to our Sun, but it is much younger, only 16 million years old. So, imagine the surprise of astronomers with this discovery \u2013 no one was expecting two planets in a single field of view.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><b>YSES-1c:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> This is the most distant planet and is about six times more massive than Jupiter. However, that is not what draws attention, but rather its high-altitude clouds composed of magnesium silicate dust grains, which are like sand, and possibly iron. And no, it is not like water vapor like here on Earth, but mineral materials that indicate an extremely young and dynamic atmosphere.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><b>YSES-1b:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> This is the innermost planet. And what caught scientists&#8217; attention was something else: it still has a disk of dust around it, something extremely rare for a planet that is 16 million years old. If we think about what is considered normal, these disks disappear within 5 million years after planetary formation. In other words, the presence of this material suggests that it may be fueling the formation of moons, like Jupiter&#8217;s natural satellites, or even still transferring mass to the planet.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>The planet that could go through a metallic hell<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As fascinating as both planets are, there\u2019s one that made scientists do a double-take: <\/span><b>YSES-1c<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Why? Because this planet isn\u2019t just hiding behind clouds\u2026 those clouds might be hiding something way more intense. Thanks to JWST\u2019s super-precise instruments, researchers picked up what could be the strongest signature of silicate clouds ever seen on an exoplanet. We&#8217;re talking about tiny mineral particles\u2014 basically, dust made of sand-like material \u2014 that get scorched by the planet\u2019s brutal heat and pile up into thick, high-altitude layers. But what does that mean?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when those clouds finally break? What comes down isn\u2019t water <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/china-discovers-ocean-in-moon-far-side\/15099\/\">(just like this ocean found on the Moon is not made of water) <\/a><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">but something way more intense: <\/span><b>liquid iron<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. That\u2019s right. Iron, which exists up there in a gaseous or dust-like form, can actually <\/span><b>condense and fall<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> through the atmosphere, possibly reaching the planet\u2019s surface like a metallic rainstorm.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>What can these planets really teach us about the universe?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The truth is, this discovery goes way beyond just YSES-1c. Sure, learning how planetary atmospheres behave under extreme heat and pressure is already a big deal. But there\u2019s more to it than that. What grabbed scientists\u2019 attention was how different the two planets in the YSES-1 system turned out to be. And you might be wondering: how different? Well\u2026 if both planets were born from the same protoplanetary disk, how come one of them still has a cloud of dust swirling around it, while the other one doesn\u2019t?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And it is this type of question that calls into question the <\/span><b>current models of planetary formation.<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> According to the researchers, the JWST is providing an immense amount of data to continue refining models and improving our understanding, which is essential to understanding even more about our Universe, such as this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/nasa-see-rare-event-outside-galaxy\/16048\/\">rare cosmic event that is outside the core of a galaxy<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Even if you&#8217;re not into astronomy or science, there&#8217;s no denying that everything that involves space, besides being a bit &#8230; <\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more-container\"><a title=\"It\u2019s darker than darkness \u2014 Mineral dust clouds hide a planet\u2019s hottest secret\" class=\"read-more button\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/mineral-dust-clouds-hide-planets-secret\/16293\/#more-16293\" aria-label=\"Read more about It\u2019s darker than darkness \u2014 Mineral dust clouds hide a planet\u2019s hottest secret\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":16294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","resize-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}