Inferno World with Titanium Skies - Astronomers claim to have Discovered Hell (+Video)

Inferno World with Titanium Skies – Astronomers claim to have Discovered Hell

Astronomers detected titanium oxide, together with water and traces of sodium, in the atmosphere of the hot-Jupiter planet WASP-19b. Part of the stellar light is absorbed in the atmosphere by these molecules, while other parts get scattered or go through almost unchanged.

In large enough quantities, titanium oxide can prevent heat from entering or escaping an atmosphere. Finding this molecule gives us hints to the temperature and pressure structure of this exoplanet, WASP-19b.

Titanium oxide is rarely seen on Earth. It is known to exist in the atmospheres of cool stars. In the atmospheres of hot planets like WASP-19b, it acts as a heat absorber.

As WASP-19b passes in front of its parent star, some of the starlight passes through the planet’s atmosphere and leaves subtle fingerprints in the light that eventually reaches Earth. By using the FORS2 instrument on the Very Large Telescope the team was able to carefully analyse this light and deduce that the atmosphere contained small amounts of titanium oxide, water and traces of sodium, alongside a strongly scattering global haze.

ESO
Read more here: http://http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1729/
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/inferno-world-with-titanium-skies

WASP-19 is a magnitude 12.3 star located in the Vela constellation of the southern hemisphere, 815 light years away. 
In December 2009 SuperWASP project announced that a hot Jupiter type extrasolar planet, WASP-19b, was orbiting very close to this star and with the shortest orbital period so far detected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-19

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser, ESA/HUBBLE, ESA/NASA