Astronomers have found another alien planet that could expand our understanding of the cosmos. Gizmodo reports that a team at Harvard and Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics spotted a gas giant 575 light-years away, WASP-62b, and it’s not just in an extremely close 4.5-day orbit makes ‘hot Jupiter’) but has no clouds. This is only the second time that any scientists have detected a cloudless exoplanet, and they are apparently rare in their entirety – less than 7 percent of the exoplanets.
Scientists first detected WASP-62b in 2012, but only recently did they have to study its atmosphere. Study leader Munazza Alam uses spectroscopic observation from the Hubble Space Telescope to detect the strong presence of sodium, an element that would be obscured if there were clouds in the planet’s atmosphere. Astronomers usually get only small clues that sodium is present, so this is ‘evidence of smoke guns’ from a cloudless planet, according to Alam.