Hot wet alien world discovered in constellation Cygnus Lucky astronomers have peered through the clear skies of tiny, faraway exoplanet HAT-P-11b – and detected signs of water vapour. Artist's impression of HAT-P-11b, a Neptune-like exoplanet with water vapour in its atmosphere The Neptune-sized world was seen through Hubble, Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes, and its clear …
There's plenty of booze out there, thankfully.
(If the science doesn't interest you, just skip to the final paragraph.)
Technically they are seeing the weather there as it happened 120 years ago so its not a very good forecast either.
According to my calculations, in the time it takes us to see the weather on that exoplanet, the weather in Boston, Massachusetts has changed states 2.1e7 times. I leave it as an exercise for the non-native readers to back-extrapolate how shifty it gets here. You may round to the nearest minute.
It's only on this planet does the assumption that cloud = water vapour hold true.
Depending on the temperature of the particular planet in question clouds could be formed of a number of substances, such as hydrogen, methane, ammonia, nitrogen, even mercury in a vapour state - to name just a few.
>Cloudy thinking
>"clouds didn't block our view of water molecules"
>"the world is blanketed in water vapour"
>So I'm no meteorologist, but doesn't "a blanket of water vapour"="clouds"
Water vapour is invisible, as is steam. What you're seeing as clouds is a mist of water droplets.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if we could go back in time and tell Kepler that in less than 400 Years, we'll send a telescope into space that lets us figure out the weather of a planet so far away it takes the light it reflected 120 years to get here. He'd think us mad, but then we'd probably say the same thing to someone 400 years form now...
Yay for the artists' impressions!
Makes me wonder, do you have to be good at drawing to be an astronomer or do observatories come with 'house artists' who receive requests like "I want a picture of a place that's got clear skies but is a little bit damp, like Waterworld, but to give you an idea, here's a photo of Prestatyn in July"?
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