James Webb Space Telescope reveals weather on exoplanets

The weather on the gas giant Ditsö` is literally alien. Clouds of solid quartz appear and disappear thanks to silicon and oxygen atoms continually evaporating from and then condensing in its atmosphere. Ditsö`, also known as WASP-17 b, orbits a star 1,300 light-years from Earth. One side of the planet is perpetually locked so that it faces the star and is thus permanently illuminated as the dayside. That half of the planet reaches temperatures of 1,773 K (1,500 °C), according to Hannah Wakeford, an astrophysicist at the University of Bristol . The nanocrystals in Ditsö`’s clouds heat up and break apart as they travel through the dayside but begin to cool down as they approach the planet’s darker half. “You’ve got this tinkling of crystals forming and shrouding the nightside,” Wakeford says. Wakeford knows this as coleader of one of the first teams of scientists to use infrared (IR) spectrometers