Saturn's hellish exoplanet has water vapours! What's hiding in this alien world?

Scientists have made a stunning discovery of water vapours looming in the atmosphere of the hot exoplanet of Saturn with the help of the CARMENES spectrograph.

The exoplanet has been designated the HD 149026 b, which has been dubbed Smertrios.

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The scientists reported the findings in a research paperwhich was published on the preprint serverarXiv. The scientists said that research can give a better understanding of the structure of this alien planet and how it was formed.

The exoplanet Smertrios is a metal-rich hot planet which orbits a yellow subgiant star of spectral type G0 IV named HD 149026. This is located at a distance of nearly 248.5 light years.

The planet has a radius of about 0.81 Jupiter radii and is nearly three times less massive than Jupiter.

According to the previous observations, Smertrios orbits its host every 2.876 days, which is nearly 0.043 AU from it. The equilibrium temperature of the planet is estimated to be 1,693 K.

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The team ofastronomers ledby Sayyed ARafi of the University of Tokyo in Japan used CARMENES at the Calar-Alto Observatory to carry out high-resolution cross-correlation spectroscopy of Smertrios.

The scientists had aimed to gainmore knowledge about the composition of the atmosphere of this exoplanet.

"Transmission spectroscopy presents one of the most successful approaches for investigating the atmospheres of exoplanets. We analyzed the near-infrared high-resolution transmission spectrum of a hot Saturn, HD 149026 b, taken using CARMENES spectrograph," wrote the researchers in the paper.

What does the existence of water vapour hint at?

Rafi's team analysed the CARMENES data and discovered evidence of a water signal - which was found really close to the expected location of Smertrios.

The signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio of the strongest signal was 4.8. The astronomers emphasised that the detected signal can be considered as evidence of the existence of water vapour.

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As per the study, the water vapour evidence in the atmosphere of the exoplanet suggests that the carbon-to-oxygen ratio of the planet is likely to be less than one if the atmosphere is homogeneous and remains at a chemical equilibrium since the hydrogen cyanide abundance is likely to be very low.

The researchers looked for hydrogen cyanide in the atmosphere of Smertrios.However, they failed to find any evidence of this compound. The astronomers stated that this was because of the relatively low S/N dataset.

(With inputs from agencies)