If the effect is confirmed to be happening over WASP-76b, it could reveal a great deal about this strange and extreme exoplanet — a world unlike anything seen in our stellar domain.
Related: Ultra-hot exoplanet has an atmosphere of vaporized rock
“There’s a reason no glory has been seen before outside our Solar System – it requires very peculiar conditions,” Olivier Demangeon, team leader and an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences in Portugal, said in a statement. “First, you need atmospheric particles that are close-to-perfectly spherical, completely uniform and stable enough to be observed over a long time. The planet’s nearby star needs to shine directly at it, with the observer — here CHEOPS — at just the right orientation.”
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