Artist’s impression of a sunset over KELT-9b. Under this blazing sun, the atmosphere of the planet is warm enough to illuminate in reddish-orange tones and to vaporise hard metals such as iron and titanium.
For the first time, researchers of the universities of Bern and Geneva have proven the presence of iron and titanium in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. The existence of these elements in gas form was theoretically predicted by a team led by the Bernese astronomer Kevin Heng and has now been confirmed by Geneva-based astronomers. Planets in other solar systems, so-called exoplanets, can revolve very closely around their star. If this star is much hotter than our sun, a unique phenomenon occurs: the exoplanet itself becomes as hot as a star. Because such gas giants are physically similar to Jupiter, they are also called "hot Jupiters" or "ultra-hot Jupiters". KELT-9 is a star located 650 light years from the earth in the Cygnus constellation. With a temperature of over 10,000 °C, it is nearly twice as hot as the sun.
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