Planet that rains rocks and has winds faster than the speed of sound discovered by scientists

Scientists have discovered a planet where it rains rocks, winds whip faster than the speed of sound and there is an ocean of magma more than 100 km deep.

Researchers have already discovered extreme “lava planets”. They are worlds so close to their host star that the surface is made up of oceans of molten lava.

But the newly analyzed planet known as K2-141b is unusual even among those extreme worlds. Its surface, ocean and atmosphere are all made up of rocks, which fall like rain and melt into its huge seas.

Two-thirds of the planet is blocked by perpetual, blazing daylight from the orange dwarf star K2-141b orbits. Because it is so close to its sun – with years lasting less than a third of a day on Earth – it is locked in gravitational position, which means that the same side of the planet is always facing its star.

On the dark side, temperatures are below -200 degrees C. On the other, daylight side, it’s around 3000 degrees C, hot enough to vaporize rocks into a thin atmosphere.

It is that atmosphere that undergoes precipitation, working on principles similar to precipitation on Earth. Just as water evaporates into the atmosphere and then falls back as rain before starting again, so do the sodium, silicon monoxide and silicon dioxide on K2-141b, with the rocky atmosphere being swept to the side by the supersonic winds and allows it to fall back to the surface.

The researchers used computer simulations to figure out what conditions might be on the planet, which is about the same size as Earth but much closer to its Sun. The planet is more than 200 light-years away and was discovered in 2018.

The researchers used existing data about the world and analyzed it using computer simulations that allowed them to understand what the planet’s atmosphere and weather cycle might look like. Their findings could be tested in the future by new technologies that will allow much more detailed observations of the atmosphere and composition of distant planets.

“The study is the first to make predictions about weather conditions on K2-141b that can be detected from hundreds of light years away with next-generation telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope,” said lead author Giang Nguyen, a doctoral student at York University.

The results are reported in a paper, “Modeling the atmosphere of the lava planet K2-141b: implications for low and high resolution spectroscopy”, published in the journal Royal Astronomical Society Monthly Notices.