This hellish exoplanet's skies rain iron and create a rainbow-like effect.

[LazyHippo]

An illustration of WASP-76b and the rainbow like glory effect in its atmosphere (Image credit: ATG under contract for ESA)
 

There are many words that could be used to describe WASP-76b — hellish, scorching, turbulent, chaotic, and even violent. This is a planet outside the solar system that sits so close to its star it gets hot enough to vaporize lead. So, as you can imagine, until now, "glorious" wasn't one of those words.

 

This more positive descriptor was added to the list quite recently, as astronomers have detected hints of something called "glory" in the atmosphere of the ultra-hot Jupiter exoplanet. The glory effect, hinted at in data from the European Space Agency's exoplanet-hunting mission Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite (CHEOPS), is a rainbow-like arrangement of colorful, concentric rings of light that occur only under peculiar conditions.

 

This effect is often seen over our own planet, as well as in the atmosphere of our violent neighbor Venus, but this is the first time scientists have seen it happening outside our cosmic neighborhood; WASP-76b is located 637 light-years away from us.
If the effect is confirmed to be happening over WASP-76b, it could reveal a great deal about this strange and extreme exoplanet — a world unlike anything seen in our stellar domain.
 

"There's a reason no glory has been seen before outside our Solar System – it requires very peculiar conditions," Olivier Demangeon, team leader and an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences in Portugal, said in a statement. "First, you need atmospheric particles that are close-to-perfectly spherical, completely uniform and stable enough to be observed over a long time. The planet's nearby star needs to shine directly at it, with the observer — here CHEOPS — at just the right orientation."

 

Discovered in 2013, WASP-76b is located just 30 million miles from its parent yellow star, which is around 1.5 times the mass and 1.75 times the width of the sun. This distance is just a 12th of the distance between the sun and Mercury, which is the closest planet to our star.

[Lagging Noob]

Nice feature about the potential iron rain, thanks for the sharing!

 

May I add that WASP-76b itself has a mass of 0.92 Jupiter mass and 1.8 Jupiter radius, so very less denser than Jupiter.