An international team of scientists has detected for the first time the presence of heavy elements such as titanium oxide in the atmosphere of the WASP-19b exoplanet, one of more than 3,500 planets discovered outside our solar system.
WASP-19b is located near the Roche boundary, which is the minimum distance at which a planet can approach its parent star without being destroyed by tidal forces.
The extrasolar planet WASP-19b was discovered in 2009 and, from the beginning, caught the attention of scientists because of how close it is to its star. So close that it only takes 19 hours to orbit it, which makes it the planet with the shortest orbital period observed so far outside the Solar System. The proximity to its star makes it a hellish world, with temperatures of about 1,700 ° C.
In 2013, observations made with the Hubble telescope allowed to detect water molecules in this gaseous giant, located about 1,000 light years from Earth. Scientists have continued to investigate their chemical composition and now this planet returns to news because they have detected for the first time a metallic oxide in their atmosphere. In particular, titanium oxide. They have also found small amounts of sodium and have confirmed the presence of water, in addition to detecting a kind of fog that envelops it. This time they have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) that the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has in Chile.
The technique used allows to separate the light of both stars and, by means of spectroscopy of high resolution, the chemical elements that compose the atmosphere of the planet are determined.
This graph shows the path of light through the WASP-19b atmosphere before reaching Earth. "Detecting such molecules is not a simple task," said Elyar Sedaghati, director of research. "Not only do we need data of exceptional quality, but we also need to carry out a sophisticated analysis. We use an algorithm that explores millions of spectra spanning a wide range of chemical compositions, temperatures, and cloud or hot properties, to reach our conclusions. " This study, published today in Nature, will certainly contribute to the modeling of exoplanetary atmospheres in general. "Being able to examine exoplanets at this level of detail is promising and exciting," added co-author Nikku Madhusudhan of Cambridge University.