Artist's impression of the PSR J2322-2650b
NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralph Crawford (STScI)
Astronomers have found one of the strangest known worlds in the Universe. It orbits a rapidly spinning neutron star called a pulsar. This in itself is unusual, but it is far from the strangest phenomenon in the exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b.
Michael Zhang from the University of Chicago and his colleagues discovered a strange planet that is more than 2,000 light years from Earth through a telescope James Webb Space Telescopeand immediately noticed that there was something unusual about it. The spectrum of light coming from it that they measured showed not the usual water and carbon dioxide that we would expect to find on such a world the mass of Jupiter, but carbon molecules.
We've never seen molecular carbon in the atmosphere of any exoplanet before because any carbon in a planet's atmosphere is much more likely to bond with other atoms than with itself. “To have molecular carbon in the atmosphere, you have to get rid of almost everything else, all the oxygen and all the nitrogen, and we just don't know how to do that,” Zhang says. “We don't know of any other planetary atmosphere that looks anything like this.”
The planet is so close to its host star, and the host star is so massive, that the pulsar's gravity is believed to have pulled it into an oblong, lemon-like shape. A full year here lasts only 7.8 hours, and the temperature even in the coldest parts of the planet is about 650°C (1202°F). Unlike most other giant planetsthe winds there blow in the direction opposite to the rotation of the planet. “You can imagine that this planet would look dark red with clouds of graphite in the atmosphere,” like a kind of evil lemon, Zhang says. “I would say this is definitely the strangest exoplanet.”
All these oddities make it difficult to explain how PSR J2322-2650b could have formed – it seems to contradict established models of planet formation. At this point, this completely strange, distant world is a complete mystery.
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