NASA Study: Celestial ‘Accident’ Sheds Light on Jupiter, Saturn Riddle
An unusual cosmic object helps scientists to better understand the hidden chemistry in the depths of the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn – and potentially those of exoplanets.
Why was silicon, one of the most common elements in the universe, was largely not detected in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn and gas planets like them in orbit other stars? A new study using observations of the NASA James Webb space telescope highlights this question by focusing on a particular object that astronomers discovered by chance in 2020 and called “the accident”.
The results were published on September 4 in the journal Nature.
The accident is a brown dwarf, a gas ball that is not quite a planet and not quite a star. Even among its peers already difficult to classify, the accident has a perplexed mixture of physical characteristics, some of which have been seen before in brown young dwarfs and others than in ancient dwarfs. Becuse of Those features, it slipped past typical detection methods before being discovered five years ago by a citizen scientist participating in backyard worlds: planet 9. The program lets people around the globe for new discoveries in data from (Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer), Which was managed by nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory in Southern California.
The accident is so weak and strange that the researchers needed the most powerful spatial observatory in NASA, webb, to study its atmosphere. Among several surprises, they found evidence of a molecule that they could not be identified initially. It turned out to be a simple silicon molecule called Silane (Sih4). The researchers have been expecting for a long time – but incapable – to find the Silane not only in the gas giants of our solar system, but also in the thousands of atmospheres belonging to brown dwarfs and the giants of gas in orbit around other stars. The accident is the first object of this type where this molecule has been identified.
Scientists are quite confident that silicon exists in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn but that it is hidden. Linked to oxygen, silicon forms oxides such as quartz which can sow clouds on hot gas giants, resembling dust storms on earth. On the giants of cooler gases like Jupiter and Saturn, these types of clouds would flow far under lighter layers of water vapor and ammonia clouds, until all the molecules containing silicon are deeply in the atmosphere, even invisible to the space machine that studied these two planets nearby.
Some researchers have also applied that lighter silicon molecules, such as Silane, should be found higher in these atmospheric layers, left behind traces of flour on the baker’s table. The fact that such molecules appear anywhere, except in a single particular brown dwarf, suggests something on chemistry happening in these environments.
“Sometimes it is extreme objects that help us understand what is going on in others,” said Faherty, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the main author of the new study.
Located about 50 light years from the earth, the accident probably formed 10 to 12 billion years, making it one of the oldest brown dwarfs ever. The universe is about 14 billion years, and when the accident developed, the cosmos mainly contained hydrogen and helium, with traces of other elements, including silicon. Above the eons, elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen have forged stars in the stars, so planets and stars that have more recently formed have more of these elements.
Webb observations on the accident confirm that the Silane can train in the brown dwarf and planetary atmospheres. The fact that the Silane seems to be missing in other brown dwarfs and giant gaseous planets suggests that when oxygen is available, it binds silicon at such a high pace and so easily, practically no silicon is left to the connection with hydrogen and form Silane.
So why is Silane in the accident? The authors of the study assume that it is because much less oxygen was present in the universe when the old brown dwarf was formed, causing less oxygen in its atmosphere to swallow all silicon. The available silicon would have rather linked to hydrogen, which would cause a Silane.
“We are not trying to solve a mystery on Jupiter and Saturn with these observations,” said Peter Eisenhardt of JPL, scientist of the project for the Sage Mission (Explorer of a large field infrared investigation), which was then reused as Neewise. “A brown dwarf is a gas ball like a star, but without an internal fusion reactor, it becomes fresher and fresher, with an atmosphere like that of giant gas planets. We wanted to see why this brown dwarf is so strange, but we did not expect Silane. The universe continues to surprise us.”
Brown dwarfs are often easier to study than giant gas exoplanets, because the light of a distant planet is generally drowned by the star it orbit, while brown dwarfs generally fly solo. And the lessons learned from these objects extend to all kinds of planets, including those outside our solar system which could present potential signs of habitability.
“To be clear, we don’t find life on the brown dwarfs,” said Fahety. “But at a high level, by studying all this variety and complexity in planetary atmospheres, we set up scientists who will one day do this type of chemical analysis for rocky planets, potentially of earth type.
A Caltech division, JPL has managed and exploited for the Directorate of the NASA Scientific Mission. The mission was competitively selected as part of the NASA explorers program managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. The Neowise mission was a project of JPL and the University of Arizona in Tucson, supported by the Coordination Office of the Planetary Defense of NASA.
For more information on Wise, go on:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/wise/main/index.html
The James Webb space telescope is the world’s leading world science observatory and an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To find out more on webb, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/webb
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
Christine Pulliam
Science Institute of the Space Telescope, Baltimore, MD.
cpulliam@scsci.edi
2025-113
