This Famously Weird 'Pink Planet' May Have Salty Clouds, Study Finds
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Add ScienceAlert on Google An illustration of the hazy, pink-hued gassy giant GJ504b, which may be a massive planet or a brown dwarf orbiting a nearby Sun-like star.
(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) Outlandishly alien worlds spark our collective cosmic imagination like nothing else. This never-ending variety includes super-Earths smack dab in their star's habitable zone, frigid Hoth-like locales, and creepy worlds that may resemble giant celestial eyeballs. However, some worlds are difficult to classify because they're so cold and dark that they're nearly invisible to ground-based observatories.
If only humanity had some sort of incredibly sensitive infrared space telescope at our disposal, such a facility could more effectively detect the scant spectral signals emanating from these elusively dim bodies. The James Webb Space Telescope, which has helped examine an object like no other: a giant pink world with salty clouds and a swirling atmosphere containing some of the chemicals found under your kitchen sink, a new study reveals. "The Pink Planet is the coldest companion ever discovered using ground-based instruments," explains Aneesh Baburaj, a postdoctoral associate who studies exoplanetary evolution at Northwestern University, and the study's lead author.
"Many teams all around the world performed follow-up observations to study its light, but it was too faint for ground-based instruments. "That made it a perfect target for JWST. When we finally obtained its spectrum, it immediately looked interesting.
But once we started digging deeper into the data, we realized it was not like anything we have analyzed before." Astronomers initially discovered this intriguing object, designated GJ504b, in 2013. It's located less than 60 light-years away, orbiting a Sun-like star at an immense distance; more than 40 times farther than Earth sits from the Sun – farther out even than Pluto.
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