Dr. David Sing

Hello.

Thank you for having me.

Well, this is a planet, what we call a hot Jupiter.

It's a gas giant, much like Jupiter, but it's orbiting very close to a host star.

And as a result, it's heated up to very high temperatures, up to 1,500 degrees Kelvin.

And at those temperatures, what we normally experience as, say, rocks, actually can form clouds in the atmosphere.

Well, this is a gas giant, so there's no surface, but indeed, if you get hotter than about 1500, these rocks are actually in vaporous form.

And as it gets colder, they can condense into solid, small particles.

Well, I mean, you can sort of think of them as little granules, but more like micron-sized tiny sand particles, like, say, quartz here on Earth.

So, you know, we don't really know how puffy and so forth they are, but just imagining sort of a big puffy cloud made of little quartz crystals is a good way to think about them.

Yes, actually, it's a big surprise on this planet.

What we find is the clouds are at very high altitudes.

So well above their stratosphere, up into even the mesosphere, and actually large particles.

So it was actually a big surprise to see them up there.

Everyone expected...

you know, something that big and heavy just to fall out.

And so normally we would see the clouds at a much lower level.

And so the planet must have actually very vigorous mixing, turbulent mixing to keep those sand clouds that high in the atmosphere.

It's really surprising.

It would look like a very actually thick, dense cloud.