'Iron Rain' Discovered On Distant Planet

An exoplanet where it “rains iron”, had discovered by the international team of astronomers. Exoplanet WASP-76b has days when its temperatures exceed 2,400 degrees Celsius (4,352 degrees Fahrenheit), which is hot enough to evaporate metals, the statement explained by Spain’s Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC). 

The scientist said that in the night with the strong wind; cool down the iron vapor so that it condenses into drops of iron.
The location of the exoplanet is 390 light-years away, toward the constellation Pisces. About 6 trillion miles is a light-year, which measures distance in space.
On WASP-76b, the remarkable conditions were discovered using the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO). On the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, the high-resolution instrument, which is co-directed by the IAC, is installed.
To identify chemical variations between night and day on WASP-76b, observing that it was the first time that such variations had been discovered in a giant “ultra-hot” planet, scientists used ESPRESSO. David Ehrenreich, a researcher at the University of Geneva and the paper’s first author, in the statement, said, however, surprisingly, they did not see this iron vapor at dawn. The only description possible for this phenomenon is that it rains iron on the dark side of this exoplanet with extreme conditions.
WASP-76b is “tidally locked, similar to earth’s moon. It means that it keeps its same face toward the object that it orbits. Jay I. González Hernández, a researcher at the IAC and part of the ESPRESSO science team said in a statement, just like the Moon around the Earth, this planet always keeps the same face towards its star as it rotates around it, which causes this extreme difference in temperature between day and night on the planet.
Núria Casasayas Barris, a researcher at the IAC and doctoral student at Spain’s University of La Laguna told that Ultrahot giant planets are the best laboratories they had for studying extreme climates on exoplanets. He further said If they would have observed an exoplanet during its transit across the disc of its star, they can study the part of its atmosphere through which the light from the star passes. With ESPRESSO it has been possible to detect chemical variations using analysis of the small part of the atmosphere they can observe.

By: Suvarna Gupta

Content: https://www.foxnews.com/science/iron-rain-discovered-on-distant-planet-scientists-reveal