01/01/2023 at 13:40 (Doha time)
Over the course of 30 years of searching for planets outside the solar system, the confirmed number of these worlds reached 5,000 in 2022, and these discoveries include a variety of distant planets, including a super-Earth, a gas giant like Jupiter, an ice giant like Neptune, and others.
Although planetary scientists have discovered thousands of these strange alien worlds, there are likely to be more than a trillion exoplanets in our Milky Way alone.
Here, we present a number of recent discoveries of exoplanets announced in 2022.
A planet that hosts metal clouds and rains precious stones
Scientists recently found that airborne minerals and gems are likely to be found on the cooler side of WASP-121 b, an exoplanet 855 light-years from Earth.
There, it is cold enough for minerals in the high atmosphere — such as magnesium, iron, vanadium, chromium and nickel — to condense into clouds.
According to Thomas Mikal-Evans, astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and lead author of the research, these clouds can resemble dust storms on Earth. Some clouds may be colored blue or red, while others are gray or green. Sometimes, it can condense into drops, which ultimately means the gems are falling from the sky.
Alien planet in the shape of a rugby ball
Although most planets are spherical, WASP-103b is not.
The European Space Agency’s Cheops space telescope found that WASP-103-b – a planet twice the size of Jupiter – is not because it orbits its star in just one day. This causes severe distortion on the planet due to the gravitational influence it is exposed to due to its star.
Eventually, this gravitational pull deformed the spherical planet into a rugby ball-like shape.
Rare find on “Super Neptune”
About 150 light-years from Earth, astronomers have discovered a “super-Neptune” (a planet slightly larger than Neptune) with water vapor in its atmosphere. This is rare.
NASA wrote: “At 150 light-years away, TOI-674 b is astronomically close, which is one of the reasons why scientists can derive the chemical composition of its atmosphere. Many questions remain, such as how much water vapor its atmosphere holds, but observing TOI-674 b’s atmosphere is much easier to observe than the atmospheres of many exoplanets, making it a prime target for deeper investigation.”
An exoplanet is still forming
Planetary scientists have discovered a giant exoplanet still forming, called AB Aurigae b.
The more than 30-year-old Hubble Space Telescope imaged the planet, which is developing in a still young and volatile disk of gas and dust called a protoplanetary disk.
The age of the newborn star of the solar system is only two million years. (The Sun, for example, is more than 4.5 billion years old.)
And the new planet is gigantic. Scientists believe that it is nine times larger than Jupiter. It orbits far from its star, about 8.6 billion miles away. This is more than twice the distance that Pluto is from the sun.
Unlike most planets, which are thought to have formed when smaller objects in the planetary disk collided and grew into large, hot planetesimals, AB Aurigae b probably formed when its cooling disk shattered into large pieces.
A massive ocean likely covers this entire exoplanet
A hundred light-years away in the universe, a sprawling ocean might be gushing over an entire distant planet.
And last August, astronomers announced that the exoplanet TOI-1452 b is close to the size of Earth and is located in a region of its solar system where liquid water could exist, and huge amounts of water – many times the amount of water on Earth – could be responsible for the planet’s low density. (Unlike the world, which is teeming with rocks and minerals).
The scientists revealed that oceans could make up about 30% of TOI-1452 b’s mass. For comparison, on Earth, water makes up only 1% of the planet’s mass.
A strange planet that looks like a marshmallow
Scientists have discovered TOI-3757 b, a gas giant with a marshmallow density, orbiting a cool red dwarf star located 580 light-years from Earth.
The planet orbits a common, albeit intriguing, type of star called a red dwarf. These stars are much smaller and less luminous than the Sun, but they are very fickle: they give off violent flares that can make nearby planets inhospitable.
Welcome to protoplanet AB Aurigae b!
Hubble captured evidence of this “Jupiter-like” protoplanet forming at a whopping distance of 8.6 billion miles away from its host star. That’s over twice as far as Pluto is from our Sun!
Learn more: https://t.co/fOkLBKxxmg pic.twitter.com/PqEAHLV6WN
— Hubble (@NASAHubble) April 4, 2022
An unprecedented discovery on a planet 700 light years away
Astronomers have found the exoplanet WASP-39 b, a hot gas giant closely orbiting a star 700 light-years away. For the first time, they discovered a “full list” of atoms and molecules in the clouds of an exoplanet, some of which are interacting.
Starlight often fuels chemical reactions on a planet, a process called photochemistry. This is what happens on WASP-39 b.
“Planets are sculpted and transformed by rotation within the host star’s radiation bath,” Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who contributed to the new research, said in a statement. “On Earth, these transformations allow life to thrive.”
WASP-39 b’s chemical inventory suggests a history of the crashes and mergers of smaller bodies called planetesimals to create the planet.
Evidence for the existence of “water worlds” in deep space
Scientists have discovered two “water worlds” in the same solar system that are believed to be teeming with water. Water can account for up to half of the mass of these planets.
These two watery worlds, which are unlike any planets seen in our solar system, are located in a planetary system located 218 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Lyre.
The two planets are called Kepler-138 c and Kepler-138 d, after NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, which has identified thousands of exoplanets and revolutionized our understanding of what lies beyond our solar system, in the deep universe.