Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday.

It seems like every week a new exoplanet drops.

NASA counts 6,000 official alien worlds, with around 8,000 more suspected.

They're stuck on the wait list until more research can be done to confirm them.

One way to spot an exoplanet is to use a telescope to carefully look at the light of a star,

watching for a tiny periodic dip in brightness as a planet crosses in front of it.

But now researchers say that using this transit method, they detected not just a planet, but it's clouds.

And the clouds on this one gas giant, some 700 light years away, are super weird.

They're made of rock.

Here to tell us more is Dr. David Singh.

He's a Bloomberg distinguished professor of Earth

and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins. Hey, David. Hello. Thank you for having me. Thanks for being

here. Tell us about this planet that you've been looking at and what the weather's like.

Well, this is a planet what we call a hot Jupiter.

It's a gas giant, much like Jupiter, but it's orbiting very close to it, host star.

And as a result, it's heated up to very high temperatures, up to 1,500 degrees Kelvin.

And at those temperatures, what we normally experience as say rocks actually can form clouds in the atmosphere like they're being boiled off the surface well this is a gas giant so there's no

surface but indeed they're um if you get hotter than about500, these rocks are actually in vaporous form.

And as it gets colder, they can condense into solid small particles.

Yeah, how should I be imagining these clouds?

Are they puffy like our clouds, or are they filled with little granules?

Well, I mean, you can sort of think of them as little granules, but more like micron-sized tiny sand articles, like, say, quartz here on Earth. So, you know, we don't really know how puffy and so forth they are, but just imagining sort of a big puffy cloud made of little quartz crystals. It's a good way

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