The James Webb Space Telescope is digging deep into the mysteries of gas planets

by | Mar 18, 2024 | Science

It could be argued that one of the most perplexing aspects of our solar system is the fact that not every planet is a nice, solid rock like Earth. Some are literally, almost entirely, made of gas. You can’t exactly “stand” anywhere on Jupiter, unless you manage to fall all the way through its gaseous layers and survive an unreal amount of pressure before making your way to the orange-streaked world’s , in fact) but it also opens the door to a breadth of fascinating future studies. With these disk-wind details in hand, for instance, Andrew Sellek, co-author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, put together a subsequent paper outlining simulations that suggest the disk-wind process is driven by something called photoevaporation.At the risk of oversimplification, photoevaporation in this case refers to energy from a star heating up gas in the disk around it, which then forces that gas to disperse into space. “Much like how water gets evaporated on Earth,” Bajaj said. Sellek’s paper was actually recently accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal; a pre-print is available to view just here.Okay, at this point I may be musing a little, but after getting so deep into the dynamics of the disk wind, I can’t help but consider how satisfying the subject is. It’s almost like the pieces simply …

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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnIt could be argued that one of the most perplexing aspects of our solar system is the fact that not every planet is a nice, solid rock like Earth. Some are literally, almost entirely, made of gas. You can’t exactly “stand” anywhere on Jupiter, unless you manage to fall all the way through its gaseous layers and survive an unreal amount of pressure before making your way to the orange-streaked world’s , in fact) but it also opens the door to a breadth of fascinating future studies. With these disk-wind details in hand, for instance, Andrew Sellek, co-author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, put together a subsequent paper outlining simulations that suggest the disk-wind process is driven by something called photoevaporation.At the risk of oversimplification, photoevaporation in this case refers to energy from a star heating up gas in the disk around it, which then forces that gas to disperse into space. “Much like how water gets evaporated on Earth,” Bajaj said. Sellek’s paper was actually recently accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal; a pre-print is available to view just here.Okay, at this point I may be musing a little, but after getting so deep into the dynamics of the disk wind, I can’t help but consider how satisfying the subject is. It’s almost like the pieces simply …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
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