Scientists Detect Unfamiliar Planet that Rains Iron

An artist's impression shows a unique type of exoplanet discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope.Reuters/Nasa Handout
An artist's impression shows a unique type of exoplanet discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope.Reuters/Nasa Handout
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Scientists Detect Unfamiliar Planet that Rains Iron

An artist's impression shows a unique type of exoplanet discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope.Reuters/Nasa Handout
An artist's impression shows a unique type of exoplanet discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope.Reuters/Nasa Handout

Scientists have detected an exotic planet in another solar system where the weather forecast is always dire - a 100 percent chance of the most outrageous rain imaginable, with droplets of hot liquid iron.

The researchers said on Wednesday they used the planet-hunting ESPRESSO instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe a planet called WASP-76b located about 640 light years from Earth.

It is nearly twice the size of Jupiter, our solar system's largest planet.

Planets discovered outside our solar system are called exoplanets, and WASP-76b is one of the most extreme in terms of climate and chemistry. It is a member of a family of exoplanets spotted in recent years called ultra-hot gas giants, Reuters reported.

It resides outstandingly close to its star, which is almost twice as big as the sun. WASP-76b orbits at only three times the radius of that star, much closer than our solar system's innermost planet Mercury orbits the sun. The same side of WASP-76b always faces its star, much as the same side of our moon always faces Earth.

The planet receives 4,000 times the solar radiation that earth gets from the sun, and its dayside temperature reaches 2,400 degrees Celsius. This ferocious heat vaporizes metals present in the planet, with strong winds then carrying iron vapor to the planet's cooler night side where it condenses into liquid iron droplets.

Molten iron rain may be a unique feature of these ultra-hot exoplanets, according to University of Geneva astronomer David Ehrenreich, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

"The extreme atmospheric conditions met in WASP-76b and its siblings, other ultra-hot gas giants, are not found anywhere in our solar system. Therefore, these exotic objects are unique laboratories to crash-test our climate models and understand the most extreme forms of atmospheric evolution," Ehrenreich said.



Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
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Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)

A new exhibition featuring artwork and poems from contemporary artists and former patients will go on show at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem, in London, the Guardian newspaper said on Monday.

The vivid dream that vanishes on waking but fragments of which remain tantalizingly out of reach all day. Powerful emotions – tears, terror, ecstasy, despair – caused not by real events, but by the brain’s activity between sleeping and waking.

“Dreams and nightmares have long been studied by psychologists,” the newspaper wrote.

Now they are the subject of a new exhibition featuring several artists that were patients at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem (sometimes known as Bedlam), and its sister institution, the Maudsley hospital.

The exhibit includes paintings by Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the late mother of Boris Johnson, who spent eight months as a patient at the Maudsley after a breakdown when her four children were aged between two and nine.

She created dozens of paintings while there, and held her first exhibition which sold out. “I couldn’t talk about my problems, but I could paint them,” she said later.

Two of Johnson Wahl’s paintings are included in the exhibition, Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions, which opens at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in August.

The centerpiece of the show is a huge installation, Night Tides, by contemporary artist Kate McDonnell. She uses swathes of bedding woven with disordered words to evoke the restlessness and clashing thoughts of insomnia.

According to Caroline Horton, professor of sleep and cognition and director of DrEAMSLab at Bishop Grosseteste university in Lincoln, “dreaming occurs during sleep, and sleep is essential for all aspects of mental and physical health.

Among other works featured in the exhibition is London’s Overthrow by Jonathan Martin, an arsonist held in the “criminal lunatic department” of Bethlem hospital from 1829 until his death in 1838. In 2012, the Guardian described it as a “mad pen-and-ink depiction of the capital’s destruction due to godlessness”.