Hubble sees influence of a jetstream on a hot, Jupiter-sized exoplanet

Tracking the planet's output as it completes an orbit.

Hubble

Since the discovery of the very first exoplanets, it's been clear that there are lots of worlds out there that are markedly different from our solar system: hot Jupiters nearly skimming their host stars' surface, super-Earths, mini-Neptunes.

But we don't know exactly what these worlds look like. For the most part, we've been left to infer their properties using indirect measurements.

This week's edition of Science contains a description of one of the exceptions. The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged light from a hot Jupiter called WASP-43b, detecting temperature differences between the planet's day and night sides. The results suggest that the planet has an eastward jet stream that redistributes some of the heat from its host star, but otherwise there's very little circulation of heat.