{"id":174333,"date":"2023-10-17T04:23:15","date_gmt":"2023-10-17T09:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/webb-detects-quartz-crystals-in-clouds-of-hot-gas-giant"},"modified":"2023-10-17T04:23:15","modified_gmt":"2023-10-17T09:23:15","slug":"webb-detects-quartz-crystals-in-clouds-of-hot-gas-giant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/webb-detects-quartz-crystals-in-clouds-of-hot-gas-giant","title":{"rendered":"Webb detects quartz crystals in clouds of hot gas giant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/webb-detects-quartz-crystals-in-clouds-of-hot-gas-giant3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers using NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope have detected evidence for quartz nanocrystals in the high-altitude clouds of WASP-17 b, a hot Jupiter exoplanet 1,300 light-years from Earth.<\/p>\n<p>The detection, which was uniquely possible with MIRI (Webb\u2019s Mid-Infrared Instrument), marks the first time that silica (SiO<sub>2<\/sub>) particles have been spotted in an <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/exoplanet\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">exoplanet<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/atmosphere\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">atmosphere<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/quartz+crystals\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">quartz crystals<\/a> are only about 10 nanometers across, so small that 10,000 could fit side-by-side across a human hair. Their size and composition of pure silica were reported in \u201cJWST-TST DREAMS: Quartz Clouds in the Atmosphere of WASP-17b,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.3847\/2041-8213\/acfc3b\">published<\/a> in Astrophysical Journal Letters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers using NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope have detected evidence for quartz nanocrystals in the high-altitude clouds of WASP-17 b, a hot Jupiter exoplanet 1,300 light-years from Earth. The detection, which was uniquely possible with MIRI (Webb\u2019s Mid-Infrared Instrument), marks the first time that silica (SiO2) particles have been spotted in an exoplanet atmosphere. The [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}