'Hot Jupiter’ with deadly stratosphere stuns scientists

A NASA-led team of scientists has determined that WASP-18b, a “hot Jupiter” located 325 light-years from Earth, has a smothering stratosphere that is loaded with carbon monoxide, or CO, but has no signs of water.

“The composition of WASP-18b defies all expectations,” said Kyle Sheppard of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“We don’t know of any other extrasolar planet where carbon monoxide so completely dominates the upper atmosphere,” Sheppard said. The findings, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, come from a new analysis of observations made by the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes.

The new study suggests that the “hot Jupiter” WASP-18b, a massive planet that orbits very close to its host star, has an unusual composition, and the formation of this world might have been quite different from that of Jupiter as well as gas giants in other planetary systems.

UCJ, UNILORIN.