If you are looking to escape the summer heatwave, WASP-76b would be a poor choice of destination.
Heatwaves on Earth may be uncomfortable and even dangerous for some, but our planet has nothing on the blisteringly hot world of WASP-76 b. Astronomers have taken a deeper look at the exoplanet on which temperatures soar to around 4,350 degrees Fahrenheit (2,400 degrees Celsius), hot enough to vaporize iron. In the process, the team identified 11 chemical elements in the atmosphere of the planet and measured how abundant they are. Remarkably, some of the rock-forming elements detected on this distant planet haven't even been measured in the solar system gas giants Saturn and Jupiter yet. "Truly rare are the times when an exoplanet hundreds of light years away can teach us something that would otherwise likely be impossible to know about our own solar system," team leader and Université de Montréal Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets Ph.D. Stefan Pelletier said in a statement. "This is the case with this study."
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