"Pink Planet" is surrounded by salty clouds, researchers using Webb telescope find

Key Points:

• Researchers led by Northwestern University used the James Webb Space Telescope to discover salt clouds in the atmosphere of the "Pink Planet" (GJ504b), a planetary-mass companion located 57 light-years from Earth.
• GJ504b is unusually cool for a giant planet at 550 degrees Fahrenheit and is estimated to be 25 times the mass of Jupiter and between 2.5 and 4 billion years old, which contributes to its lower temperature.
• The discovery of salt clouds is significant because such clouds were theorized but never observed at these intermediate temperatures, representing a unique atmospheric composition between water clouds on Earth and ammonia or silicate clouds on other planets.
• The James Webb Space Telescope's infrared capabilities allowed researchers to detect the planet's faint light and create a spectral fingerprint revealing water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and salt clouds, which previous ground-based observations could not achieve.
• This finding opens new possibilities for studying colder planetary atmospheres and objects with higher metal-to-hydrogen ratios, expanding our understanding of planetary atmospheres beyond the solar system.