Gazing into the night sky, viewers will spot a pulsing bright orb, or Venus, because its dense clouds reflect the sunlight, and it revolves around the sun in the opposite direction as Earth. Scientists have recently detected an exoplanet with an “eccentric” orbit nearly 117 light-years away from Earth, which also reflects starlight as it migrates towards its host star, reported in Tech Times.
Designated as HD 20782, led by astronomer Stephen Kane of the team that detected the wandering planet. Its orbit is strangely elliptical as opposed to other planets in our solar system, specifically, revolving in a flattened elliptical path, which affords scientists an opportunity to examine its atmosphere.
Kane helmed the study with the Transit Ephemeris Refinement and Monitoring Survey (TERMS), which was assigned to spot exoplanets passing in front of their host stars. Scientists used a satellite-based telescope to capture light information from the planet as it orbits nearer to its star. Changes in luminosity were observed, which signals that reflected light is bouncing off the exoplanet’s atmosphere.
The reflected light informs astronomers how the planet reacts when it’s away from its star and then approaches when the planet is flash-heated witnessed by the explosion of light and heat. A star’s brightness is determined by its atmospheric conditions, such as Jupiter and Venus as they’re covered in icy particles causing reflection; however, if Jupiter were to move closer to the sun, the intense heat would melt the icy substance.
But HD 20782’s atmosphere does not have the same reaction time. “The time it takes to swing around the star is so quick that there isn’t time to remove all the icy materials that make the atmosphere so reflective,” said Kane. Also, scientists haven’t determined HD 20782’s atmospheric formation, but their studies reveal that it could have an intensely reflective cloud cover.