Exoplanet's deep blue color a surprise to scientists

For the first time, scientists have determined the color of a planet outside our solar system.

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That punishing climate makes the blue color surprising not just on a scientific level, but also on a visceral one.

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"It's very counterintuitive that this planet should be blue-colored. Because it was the size of Jupiter and was so close to the sun, we would have thought it would have a brownish, red color," said Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist at the NASA Exoplanet Institute.

Kane, who was not affiliated with the study, noted that planets within our own system tend to follow a red-hot and blue-cold color scheme.

That expectation of heat and color correlation in planets comes from biases based on our own solar system, he said, noting that astronomy often confounds our assumptions, especially as it ventures further afield, where each newly studied planets seems more improbable, more outrageous, than the last.

Pont said that his team’s study of nine other exoplanets akin to HD 189733b in that they are huge and close to their respective suns – known as hot Jupiters – has likewise offered up counterintuitive results: Given those basic similarities, scientists had expected them to be similar in other aspects. They aren’t.

“We’d like to put all hot Jupiters into one box, but they are as diverse as the planets in our own solar system,” said Pont. “That’s at once exciting and very daunting.”

While much is still unknown about other solar systems – as well as about our own – recent research has offered an increasingly clearer picture of worlds some light years away from ours, moving beyond exoplanet detection to exoplanet categorization, as we learn more about the atmospheres of those ultra-foreign planets, said Pont. He added that finding the color of exoplanets is an important step in those categorization efforts, much as determining the color of our own solar system’s planets has helped us better understand conditions there.

Earlier this month, new research that factored in the influence of cloud cover on alien climate brought a boon to exoplanet categorization, extending the habitable zone around red dwarf stars to include double the number of planets there. That added some 60 billion habitable planets to the existing number of potentially life-supporting planets in the Milky Way.