{"id":290921,"date":"2025-07-25T15:29:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T15:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/290921\/"},"modified":"2025-07-25T15:29:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T15:29:11","slug":"nasa-spots-cosmic-rain-but-not-of-water-illuminated-clouds-could-be-creating-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/290921\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA spots cosmic rain, but not of water \u2014 Illuminated clouds could be creating life"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is not every day that it rains in space<\/strong> \u2013 specially not liquid water. NASA has been searching for water in a liquid state in the universe for decades, but the only thing they could find was icy formations. In some ways, this is a sign that there are other states of matter for the crucial element for life. In others, it doesn\u2019t say much because it needs to be liquid for organic and microbiological life to proliferate. On the other hand, the discovery is also pushing the boundaries of the NASA\u2019s most famous super telescope: the James Webb.<\/p>\n

Water raining still not found<\/p>\n

In our solar system, many planets have their own natural obstacles. In Mars, there are dust storms. Jupiter has no atmosphere. And in Uranus and Neptune, diamonds fall from the skies due to extreme heat and pressure. In every corner of the universe, something particular happens.<\/p>\n

Out there is not much different from Earth. It has all the elements we have in our planet \u2013 helium, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen are among the most abundant in the cosmos \u2013 but scientists can\u2019t seem to find the combination between hydrogen and oxygen (water). Now, NASA has found something even more intriguing than this: sand rain.<\/strong><\/p>\n

NASA has discovered a Star Wars-like planet<\/p>\n

Using NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have identified a young planetary system located about 300 light-years from Earth. This system includes two gas giants named YSES-1 b and YSES-1 c, both containing dense, rough clouds of silica particles\u2014the kind of material you\u2019d recognize as sand. (Yes, like Anakin said, it really does get everywhere.)<\/p>\n

NASA believes that finding these particles around a star just 16.7 million years old might offer clues about how planets and moons like those in our own solar system, which is over 4.5 billion years old, came to form. Since both of these planets are massive gas giants<\/strong>, similar in size to Jupiter and Saturn, researchers hope to observe in real time how such planets evolve.<\/p>\n

A specialist shares insight on the discovery<\/p>\n

According to Valentina D\u2019Orazi, from Italy\u2019s National Institute for Astrophysics, studying these sand-like clouds in planets outside our solar system is valuable because it gives insight into how atmospheres work and how planets are shaped over time.<\/p>\n

She explained that these clouds stay suspended thanks to a process similar to Earth\u2019s water cycle<\/strong>, where materials evaporate and condense again. This process points to complex atmospheric behavior that scientists are only beginning to understand. One of the planets, YSES-1 c, has about 14 times the mass of Jupiter. Its atmosphere is rich in silica clouds that not only give it a reddish color but also cause sand-like rains to fall towards its inner layers.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, its neighboring planet, YSES-1 b, is still in the process of forming. Weighing about six times as much as Jupiter<\/a>, this young world is gathering more sand particles from a surrounding disk of dust and gas that continues to feed its growth.<\/p>\n

The James Webb Space Telescope has been used for multiple studies<\/p>\n

This discovery marks the first time that silica clouds\u2014likely made of minerals like pyroxene or combinations such as bridgmanite and forsterite\u2014have been seen both high in a planet\u2019s atmosphere and within the disk circling around it.\u00a0 NASA\u2019s JWST could capture such clear details because these two planets orbit their star at very large distances, roughly five to ten times farther than Neptune is from our Sun. Though this technique is still limited to a few distant worlds, these findings show how powerful the JWST is for studying not just the skies of exoplanets<\/a>, but also the surrounding environments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is not every day that it rains in space \u2013 specially not liquid water. NASA has been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290922,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3844],"tags":[70,413,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-290921","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114914588914480687","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}