"Simulation of 3-D exotic clouds on an exoplanet" Topic

"Scientists have catalogued nearly 2,000 exoplanets around stars near and far. While most of these are giant and inhospitable, improved techniques and spacecraft have uncovered increasingly smaller worlds. The day may soon come when astrophysicists announce our planet's twin around a distant star.

But size alone is insufficient to judge a globe. Though Earth and Venus are nearly identical in size, the latter's surface is hot enough to melt lead. Astronomers must gather information about an exoplanet's atmosphere, often through observing how the planet scatters or absorbs light from its parent star. But, that information is not always useful -- as is the case with the exoplanet GJ1214b.

"When an exoplanet passes in front of its star, light can be absorbed at some wavelengths by molecules in the atmosphere, which we can analyze by looking at how light passes through the planet's atmosphere," said Benjamin Charnay, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Washington Department of Astronomy. "But for this planet, when researchers previously looked with the Hubble Space Telescope, they saw almost no variation with wavelength of light."…"
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