'Imagine a burning world, close to its star, with heavy clouds of metals floating aloft, raining down titanium droplets.'
It's so close, in fact, that according toits surface temperature sits somewhere around 2,000 degrees Celsius. At that temperature and proximity, scientists wouldn't usually expect a planet to have much of an atmosphere at all, let alone one that shines the way that this one does.
To explain the planet's shine, the researchers examined data from the European Space Agency's CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite , a. CHEOPS tracked the planet as it moved behind its home star — also known as a secondary eclipse — ten different times, allowing the scientists to more precisely measure the planet's brightness.
"The clouds reflect light and stop the planet from getting too hot and evaporating," Sergio Hoyer, the study's lead author and a researcher at the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory, said in a statement. "Meanwhile, being highly metallic makes the planet and its atmosphere heavy and harder to blow away."
"Similarly," he added, "LTT9779 b can form metallic clouds despite being so hot because the atmosphere is oversaturated with silicate and metal vapors."
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