The Planet That Rains Iron by Mia Jardine

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A far-away planet, 640 light-years to be exact, known as Wasp-76b by astronomers “rains iron.” For some background information, the planet is enormous, about twice the size of Jupiter and is gaseous. It is so close to its host star that temperatures during the daytime get up to and over 2,400 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to destroy metals. When it reaches night time, however, it drops 1,000 degrees. The metals melted during the day cool and drop to the ground at night, or are rained down. Dr. David Ehrenreich from the University of Geneva says “imagine instead of a drizzle of water droplets, you have iron droplets splashing down.” He and his coworkers have recently published their research on Wasp-76b to the journal Nature. In the publishing, they detail their use of “the new Espresso instrument at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile”, which they used to look further at the planet’s inner workings/mechanics. Since Wasp-76b is so close to its star, it only takes 43 hours to revolve around it once (compared to our 365 days). Similarly to our moon, this planet is also “tidally-locked”, meaning it doesn’t rotate on its axis and each side is always day time or night time. The side facing the star is always taking the full force of the heat. It gets so hot that the atmosphere is broken down into separate atoms. Due to the “stillness” of Wasp-76b and temperatures of each side of the planet, extreme winds are produced. According to Dr. Ehrenreich, they could get up to 18,000km/h. The team was able to sense “a strong iron vapor signature” when the day turned into night, but the “iron signal” was gone by the morning. Dr. Ehrenreich explains they think the iron condenses on the dark side where it’s cold enough (1,400C) for the iron to turn into clouds, rain, and then droplets. The further layers of the atmosphere take in the iron, which the scientists can’t detect. New discoveries like this are important so we can further understand other celestial bodies in the universe for when humanity inevitably expands out of the Earth and onto other planets, although I’m not sure if humanity would like to live on a planet that rains iron.

An idea of what Wasp-76b may look like 


Article link: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51828871

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