Scientists Find That Common Exoplanets Sport Cloudy Weather

In a groundbreaking move, scientists utilizing data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have created models of the atmospheres of two of the most common types of planets in the Milky Way and the results show a very cloudy situation.

The two studies focused on planets GJ 436b, located 36 light-years away, and GJ 1214b, located 40 light-years away. GJ 436b is classified as a "warm Neptune" due to its size, while GJ 1214b is a "super-Earth." Both planets' masses fall in between Earth and Jupiter, but neither class of planet can be found in the solar system.

"Both planets are telling us something about the diversity of planet types that occur outside of our own solar system; in this case we are discovering we may not know them as well as we thought," said Heather Knutson from the California Institute of Technology and the team that studied GJ 436b.

"We'd really like to determine the size at which these planets transition from looking like mini-gas giants to something more like a water world or a rocky, scaled-up version of the Earth. Both of these observations are fundamentally trying to answer that question."

Detailed observations like these are some of the first glimpses scientists have into these planets' atmospheres, which turn out to have a large amount currently-unexplainable clouds.

"You would expect very different kinds of clouds to form than you would expect, say, on Earth," said Laura Kreidberg from the University of Chicago who led the team that studied GJ 1214b.

The researchers hope that more data on different planets' atmospheres will help locate more potentially habitable exoplanets in the future.

You can read the full published study detailing the findings concerning GJ 1214b here and the study for GJ 436b here.