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NASA's Webb Detects Tiny Quartz Crystals in Clouds of Hot Gas Giant

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October 16, 2023 10:00AM (EDT)Release ID: 2023-140
Illustration showing a portion of the disk of a cloudy planet set against the black background of space. The planet fills the lower right half of the frame, with the limb (the edge, or horizon) curving from the bottom left to the upper right. The planet is partially lit by a star that is off to the upper left, out of view. The planet is brightest along the limb (on the dayside), and grows dimmer toward the lower right corner (the nightside), becoming almost completely dark about halfway in. Wispy, light-tan-colored clouds are visible in the lit portion and there is a hazy blueish glow along the horizon. Several stars are scattered in the background.

Summary

Flakes of silica “snow” fill the skies of puffy, searing-hot exoplanet WASP-17 b.

Catching a glimpse of one of the most common and familiar minerals on Earth rarely merits a headline. Quartz is found in beach sands, building stones, geodes, and gem shops around the world. It’s melted to produce glass, refined for silicon microchips, and used in watches to keep time.

So what’s so special about the latest discovery from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope? Imagine quartz crystals that appear quite literally out of thin air. A mist of glittering grains so small that 10,000 could fit side-by-side across a human hair. Swarms of pointy, glassy nanoparticles racing through the sweltering atmosphere of a puffy gas giant exoplanet at thousands of miles per hour.

Webb’s unique ability to measure the extremely subtle effects of those crystals on starlight – and from a distance of more than seven million billion miles, no less – is providing critical information about the composition of exoplanet atmospheres and new insights into their weather.

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Full Article

Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected evidence for quartz nanocrystals in the high-altitude clouds of WASP-17 b, a hot Jupiter exoplanet 1,300 light-years from Earth. The detection, which was uniquely possible with MIRI (Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument), marks the first time that silica (SiO2) particles have been spotted in an exoplanet atmosphere. “We were thrilled!” said David Grant, a researcher at the University of Bristol in the UK and first author on a paper being published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We knew from ...

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News releases highlighting the discoveries of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are produced for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, under NASA Contract NAS5-03127. News release content is developed by the News Team in STScI’s Office of Public Outreach.

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